Welcome to Libera Chat

Wow. It’s been two decades plus since I was a regular IRC user but when I was I mostly used Freenode. It looks like Freenode had a hostile takeover of sorts, resulting in people resigning from freenode. Now they are launching a separate IRC network.

Control of freenode infrastructure will soon be transferred to Freenode Limited and its agents. This means your data will soon be available to their personnel. We don’t know these people; neither do most of you. We can’t claim that this is a good or even acceptable outcome, and are loath to entrust your data to a third party, but it appears that we have run out of options.

The only good thing here is because of open standards and open source software it isn't hard for people to pick up their marbles and find a new place to be.