Let me start by saying this is a space I am not at all familiar with. I didn't grow up with IRC, my first text editor was Sublime (I'm not from the "EMACS vs. VIM" generation,) so I feel kinda outta touch with what all is going on.

Is there a winner? I feel invested in this topic after seeing a whole slew of posts, blogs, and medium articles posted all over Reddit and HN breaking down how these folks have personally been impacted over the past month or so. It seems to have died down which leaves me with the question of what the outcome was. An even 50/50 split? Libera destroying Freenode? Or Freenode able to hold onto users by successfully preventing efforts to organize a transition?

Without being in the Freenode community, I don't have a feeling for whether Freenode is dead, Libera Chat is "winning" and I don't think there's a good way to get metrics either.

Anyone in this world who can help the uneducated out on the outcome of all of this?

I'm just curious how many people still use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) here. And if you use it, what do you use it for? Is there anything (server/channels, etc) that you would recommend to others?

I use it a bit, mostly for casual chatting on tildeverse.org servers, the SDF server, or on Freenode. On Freenode, I also use it when I need to interact with FOSS developers who use IRC as one of their main forms of support.

I recently floated this idea in a comment elsewhere, but I wanted to gauge interest in having an unofficial Tildes IRC channel. The purpose of this channel would just be general, casual discussion with other users of Tildes about anything, and particularly those topics which may not warrant an entire thread on the site here. I know that these days IRC isn't the most popular chat option, with things like Discord filling the void. However IRC is appealing in that users can choose between multiple clients, and in that such a Tildes channel would not need many of the features offered by Discord. How would people feel about such a space?

#tildes:matrix.org

So there are many, many Matrix clients but the most popular one seems to be Riot which is available on iOS, Android (F-Droid, Play Store), and as a web app which you can join by clicking the link above.

It's similar to Discord in the features it offers, but being open source I thought it might be more in the spirit of Tildes than some of the proprietary alternatives.

That being said I'll be the first to admit Riot is a bit rough around the edges and Matrix seems to be under both heavy load and development. If there's demand for it I should be able to get a dedicated server up since it's an optionally federated service.

Oh, and as a bonus the Matrix chat links with the Tildes IRC channels (#tildes and ##tildes) on freenode, so there's that. (Thanks @tyil)

Don't forget to visit @Kat's wonderful ~tech wiki for links to other options such as Discord and Telegram if them's more your fancy.

Happy wordsing!