Hi all, As you may have heard the Freenode IRC network, long the home of #ghc and several other prominent Haskell channels, appears to be in the middle of a rather nasty hostile takeover [1,2,3,4]. As a consequence, it seems it will be necessary to migrate the #ghc community elsewhere. The next question is, of course, where will this be. One option is Liberachat, the spiritual successor of Freenode. However, in recent years I have also heard an increasingly loud choir of users, contributors, and potential-contributors note how archane IRC feels when compared to other modern chat platforms. Using IRC effectively in a collaborative environment essentially requires that all parties use a bouncer; however, this is (understandably) isn't something that most users are willing to do. Consequently, I think it would be wise to expand our search space to include other FOSS platforms. At the moment, I can see the following options: 1. Remain on IRC and move to Liberachat, the spiritual successor of Freenode 2. Remain on IRC and move to OFTC, another widely used network 3. Move to [Matrix] 4. Move to [Zulip] My sense is that of the non-IRC options Matrix is the truest successor to IRC, being a federated protocol with a wide array of (if somewhat immature) clients. I know some of our contributors already use it and in principle one could configure an IRC-to-Matrix bridge for those existing contributors who would rather continue using IRC. Zulip, while also being FOSS, is far more centralized than Matrix and appears to be more of a chat web application than an open protocol. Do you know of any other options? Thoughts? Cheers, - Ben [1]: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af497409 [2]: https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt [3]: https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bdd66b8f491 [4]: https://mniip.com/freenode.txt [Matrix]: https://www.matrix.org/ [Zulip]: