Introduction
Following the recent news around Freenode, we followed a great many open source projects in moving our IRC presence from the Freenode network over to the Libera network.
We expect it will take a few weeks for most users to migrate but have updated the topics of the old channels accordingly. We’re also still updating documentation and links where we find them. If we missed any, let us know!
This change also gave us the opportunity to clean things up a bit and we now own the #lxc-* namespace on Libera. This will make it easier to spin up additional channels as needed without running into issues with potential squatters .
Channels
At present, we’re running two public channels:
-
#lxc=> Main channel for our users and where support questions should be asked -
#lxc-dev=> Development channel where we have our day to day development discussions. We do not answer support questions in there.
We may expand this list if we feel the need, but we first want to see how many folks join and what kind of activity we’re getting before we look into segmenting things more.
Cloaks
As part of this move, we’re also able to issue IRC cloaks.
Those are basically a replacement for your IP/FQDN with a cleaner string indicating project affiliation. So instead of appearing as foo@123.123.213.213 you can show up as foo@lxc/foo or the like.
Our structure for those at the moment is:
-
@lxc/<nick>for maintainers/committers of projects under https://github.com/lxc -
@lxc/contributor/<nick>for anyone who’s contributed to one of our projects in a non-trivial way (not just code, can be forum activity, translation, …) -
@lxc/bot/<nick>for official IRC bots (currently justlxcbot)
If you’d like one of those, feel free to reach out to me directly. I may end up processing them in batches to not overload the poor Libera Chat staff 
How to join
One time or infrequent use
If you just want to join to ask a few questions and don’t intend to stick around, the easiest is likely through the web KiwiIRC client. That’s what we’ve linked to in our documentation.
Note that since you won’t be a registered user, the only channel you’ll get to join is #lxc.
To join, just go to: https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.libera.chat/#lxc
More frequent use
For those wanting to hang out in those channels in a more regular basis, you should register your IRC nickname which will prevent anyone else from impersonating you and will also allow you to join #lxc-dev if you want to.
You can still use KiwiIRC but will need to authenticate after connecting, or you may want to switch to another IRC client. There are good desktop ones on all platforms or more advanced web ones like IRC Cloud.
Active contributors and maintainers
We recommend our project maintainers and top contributors to get a constant connection on IRC. This is the only way you get to look at the chat history on IRC as there is no history replay when you join channels.
Some of us like running weechat on a remote server and then attaching over SSH, the Android App or the web client. Others use a paid IRC Cloud subscription to achieve the same. You can also run an IRC bouncer instead, then connect to that from a regular IRC client.
All of those provide a constant IRC presence and will let you look at what happened in our channels while you were away and deal with any personal messages that may have been sent to you direct that time.