Due to the recent takeover of Freenode IRC[1] and Tox IRC channels being hostilely taken over by the new Freenode staff without any prior notice[2], we have moved our IRC presence to Libera Chat IRC[3]. All Tox IRC channels have moved to Libera. Any Tox channel you see on Freenode (or any other network) is not official. You can see the up-to-date list of our IRC channels on the wiki[4].
We are not the only project that has made the switch. Many high-profile projects and communities have left Freenode for Libera: Arch Linux[5], curl[6], Django[7], FFmpeg[8], Gentoo[9][10], Haskell[11], NGINX[12], PostgreSQL[13], Python[14], Ubuntu[15][16], Void Linux[17], Wikimedia[18] and many more[19]. Some of them have had their channels taken over by the new Freenode staff as well[20]. If you want to learn more about the incident, this blog post has links to many of sources[21].
Libera Chat is run by the staff that ran Freenode before it got taken over[22]. It’s the continuation of Freenode, with the the same staff, rules, IRC services and many of the same projects. Tox has been on Freenode for almost 8 years, since its very inception in June 2013, and many Tox developers had been using Freenode even before that. It saddens us to have to part with Freenode, even if just in name, and we are grateful to its former staff for managing it for us for such a long time and to Freenode’s sponsors for keeping the lights on. We hope that Libera becomes the new IRC network of choice for open source projects like Freenode once was.
See you on Libera Chat!
