Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.

Please note that at this point the only official Gentoo IRC channels, as well as developer accounts, can be found on Libera Chat.

2021-06-15 update

As a part of an unannounced switch to a different IRC daemon, the Freenode staff has removed all channel and nickname registrations. Since many Gentoo developers have left Freenode permanently and are not interested in registering their nicknames again, this opens up further possibilities of malicious impersonation.

The Gentoo Council held an emergency single agenda item meeting today. At this meeting, we have decided to move the official IRC presence of Gentoo to the Libera Chat IRC network. We intend to have this move complete at latest by 13/June/2021. A full log of the meeting will be available for download soon.

At the moment it is unclear whether we will retain any presence on Freenode at all; we urge all users of the #gentoo channel namespace to move to Libera Chat immediately. IRC channel names will (mostly) remain identical. You will be able to recognize Gentoo developers on Libera Chat by their IRC cloak in the usual form gentoo/developer/*. All other technical aspects will feel rather familiar to all of us as well. Detailed instructions for setting up various IRC clients can be found on the help pages of the IRC network.