Libera.Chat

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2021-06-30 18:30:05

Whew - what a month (and a couple of days). Few of us expected earlier in the year to have to create a new IRC network, from scratch, in a few days!

And yet, that’s what we did. On May 19th, Libera Chat, formed by the ex freenode staff team, opened its doors. We’re incredibly grateful for the many thousands of you who followed us. With your help, we have a thriving network of over 15 000 channels and 40 000 registered users across more than 700 projects, communities and informal spaces, and we did that in the space of a month.

Building up an IRC network to this scale in this short a time period has been a tough challenge, but also incredibly rewarding. It would not have been possible without the kind sponsorship of various organisations with an interest in the FOSS community - an acknowledgements page will be on the website shortly to list them all.

When we launched, we had a small handful of EU-based servers, mostly sponsored by the Libera volunteer staff team themselves out of their own pockets. Now, we have 20+ boxes across the world, and new regional rotations (irc.eu.libera.chat, irc.us.libera.chat and others) allowing users to connect to a server closer to them.