Libera Chat

Happy Birthday, Libera Chat!

2022-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Hello everyone, today we celebrate the anniversary of Libera.Chat going public!

Where we are coming from

Exactly one year ago Libera.Chat was unveiled as a real time communication and collaboration service for free and open-source software, peer-directed projects, openly licensed content and collaboration. Starting from scratch we managed, just within a few months, to become the largest IRC network.

Starting from scratch, we managed to gain around 50 000 users in just a month and a half, a number which has been mostly steady since. With regard to channels we had roughly 15 000 channels formed within half a month, compared to the usercount this number is still growing, but the curve flattened itself a bit. You can see detailed graphs over at https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=Libera.Chat

We also saw many communities and projects migrating over to Libera from other places in the first few days, counting 250 in just one week and 500 after a month. Today we are hosting roughly 950 projects and communities, and that number is still growing. We are hoping to reach the 1000th registration soon!

All these communites are quite diverse. Libera.Chat services are not only used by major free/open source operating systems and well known, world wide operating institutions such as the Wikimedia Foundation; we also have local Linux User Groups, the hackspace around the corner hacking on whimsical gadgets and liberating your hardware or someones scratch-your-own-itch image viewer that call Libera.Chat their home.

In summary we had a phenomenal first year and all of this would not have been possible without many helping hands. So we want to send out a big thank you for all the volunteers, sponsors, projects and users that supported us since we started.

Where we are now

With the numbers becoming mostly stable, we focus on keeping the network running smoothly, ironing out some minor bumps and improving our tooling. Just recently we finally got infrastructure up and ready to accept monetary donations, details can be found at https://libera.chat/contributing/donate/. We are using this money to cover the operational costs of the network as well as the administrative upkeep of the legal entity. These costs were mostly covered and donated by our volunteers so far. Libera.Chat will stay a non-profit organisation, ran by unpaid volunteers on donated hardware. We will communicate our financial status and usage of donations in a transparent manner.

Transparency in general is very important to us. You can find our annual report for our first year at https://libera.chat/annual-reports/2021/, including the financial and auditor report and the reports written by our three main teams: engineering, operations and projects & community. They contain some more detail about the various areas and daily work of libera volunteers.

In the last few months, we have launched a Trust & Safety working group to hone and organise the tools and skills we have for keeping users safe and mitigating abuse on our network. The working group has already seen enthusiastic involvement across our stafferbase and the group has been the source of numerous compassionate new ideas and solutions to difficult human problems, and they look forward to continuing to do so going forward.

What the future holds

We are aware that the protocol we are using, IRC, has been around for quite a while and had various features glued on over the past decades. Therefore it is sometimes hard to compete against more modern, freshly developed solutions in terms of usability or also features. We are working hard, both on our software stack and by collaborating in working groups such as https://ircv3.net/ to offer a more pleasant user experience and IRC being easier for fresh onboarding users.

We are equally aware that some of our tooling could be more open, more usable and sometimes more useful in general. As such, we are looking to continue work on tools and make further improvements.

As usual, keep an eye on our website, our social media channels and our source code repositories for news and announcements.

We would like to conclude with another big thank you. Without our users, projects, sponsors and volunteers Libera.Chat could not exist and would not have grown as much within just one year. We hope that you are enjoying the services we provide to our communities, and you are always welcome to drop by in #libera for comments, questions or a quick chat with us.

2021 Libera end of year review

2021-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Hello everyone!

As this year slowly comes to an end, we would like to look back at what happened on Libera in 2021 and see what the future might hold for us.

Changes since our last blog post

We have enabled the +w usermode by default. This means you will receive wallops, messages sent to all users, usually about maintenance that will impact you or announcements such as new major releases from projects registered on Libera. If you would like to opt out of these messages, you can unset the w mode on connect.

Stats

We can’t have an end-of-year review without some numbers to go with it. As we got started this year, we don’t have a huge number of stats or any interesting trends to show. Most of these numbers have an implicit “over last year’s number of zero” attached.

We gained one new Libera.Chat! On which we had, at the time of writing:

A maximum of 51 728 users connected at one time
A bit more than 21 000 channels opened
Around 64 000 NickServ accounts
Roughly 18 000 channels registered with ChanServ

Projects and communities

Thanks to the great work of the Libera Staff team, we now have over 900 projects and communities registered. While there is still a little backlog left, we now have fewer than 30 open old registration tickets, quite a change compared to the numbers in the hundreds we had in the past months. This makes us confident that, despite the usually very busy holiday season, we should be able to focus on new incoming registrations and handle them more swiftly.

Libera.Chat organisation

We’ve had a few new staffers join the team since starting the network in May. We hope you’ll extend a warm welcome!

We’re always looking to make our policies more effective and reduce the friction they cause you. To that end, we no longer require user/ cloaks to be all-lowercase, and now default to preserving the registered casing. Please let us know if you want yours to be updated to match that. We’ll continue to make improvements where we find them.

Happy new year

One tradition we would like to keep on Libera is the “Happy-New-Year”-channel, where people can share the joy of ascii artwork and best wishes with the community in a more casual, festive atmosphere. The channel #libera-newyears will be open during New Year’s Eve across timezones, hoping to provide happiness and festivities free of the concerns about in-person meetings.

Thank you

We would like to take the time to thank all of our sponsors for providing the infrastructure and support needed to keep the network up, running and reachable. We appreciate the donated hardware, time and the good collaboration and communication with our ops team.

And, last but most definitely not least, we’d also like to thank the Libera.Chat userbase for joining us in this space and bringing your many and varied personalities and interests. Without you, this network would simply be a bunch of servers sending control traffic back and forth; we really do appreciate how many people have chosen to hang their hat here.

The entire Libera.Chat team wishes you a merry holiday season and, if you celebrate, happy festivities. Stay safe, stay healthy and all the best wishes for many more years.

Lengthening Nickname Expiry

2021-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Hello Libera Chat users,

We intend to extend the routine nickname expiry policy from 10 to 20 weeks, doubling the time a nick must be unused to consider expired. Please read on below to find out more about what this means and why we’re doing it.

One of the unusual things about IRC is that you can group multiple nicks to your account identity - essentially giving you what seems like multiple usernames.

This is cool, but in order to prevent nicks becoming unusable where an account has grouped them, but never uses them, we also have an expiration policy: currently that policy states that any nick unused for 10 weeks can be removed from your account, on request for re-use, at staff discretion.

This is a policy that’s been extant for many years, inherited from our previous incarnation, and it’s served us well. After giving it much thought, however, we’ve decided that we believe that 10 weeks is too short a period of time. It’s not been uncommon for people to take 2-3 months away from IRC and find that their account has been dropped.

With this in mind we have considered a number of options, but decided that simple is best, a straight doubling of the time-span. This also means that setting your account into VACATION mode also doubles, reaching 60 weeks - a bit over a year.

We intend to bring this policy into effect in 10 weeks time, so as to avoid changing the status of any nicks until a full expiry period has elapsed under the current policy. You can see the exact working of the policy change at the pull request here.

Please note that as with the current policy, expired nicks are not automatically dropped. Expired nicks are only dropped on request, and subject to staff discretion. Please do not be concerned about your account or nicks - we are only extending the current policy to make it even less likely that they are expired. We also plan to re-evaluate how this policy has gone in a while, to see whether 20 weeks is working for us all.

As always, we’re available on /stats p and in #libera to answer any questions you have about this policy.

Let’s Encrypt root CA expiry

2021-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

Hello,

The root CA for most Let’s Encrypt certificates expired today. Just about everyone was waiting for this, but in our case we felt there was nothing for us to do but wait and see what happened; LE’s plan for dealing with the expiration seemed solid enough. Oops.

So what was the plan? LE have continued to provide, in the default chain in their API, a version of their CA cert that’s signed by the expiring root CA. (This is known as cross-signing). This was done to provide a workaround for some devices (as far as I know, mostly very old Androids) and was presumably tested against web browsers, which regularly update their TLS libraries.

Not all other software does. Serving the cross-signed root in our chain broke Hexchat on Windows, amongst other software combinations, because Hexchat uses a version of OpenSSL that doesn’t search exhaustively for a correct validation path if it’s served a chain that is (as in this instance) trusted but invalid.

We’ve chosen to remove the cross-signed root from our chains for now, fixing the clients that we’ve been able to test. This will be subject to review based on your feedback, so please let us know if you were relying on the cross-signed root. We can be reached at support@libera.chat; you can of course disable validation or connect insecurely as a workaround, but please weigh any such workaround against the security risks it carries.

As always, thanks for using Libera Chat.

Just over 100 days of Libera Chat

2021-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Hello everyone!

It’s now been a bit over three months since we invited you all over to our new IRC home. We hope you have settled in fine, and please do let us know if there are outstanding issues that we need to attend to.

You may have noticed our maintenance cycle of upgrading a couple of servers at the end of each week. These restarts are enabling us to upgrade to the latest Debian release and to bring the latest Atheme and Solanum improvements to the whole network. We’ll be continuing to perform regular maintenance on the network at this weekly pace. In order to reduce the impact on users we’re taking affected servers out of DNS rotation ahead of time and notifying their users when to expect shutdowns. Reconnecting to irc.libera.chat will always get you back to a live server.

This past month or so, we’ve also been spending some time behind the scenes polishing up our website. If you peek over to the tab titled Guides you will notice we have a bunch of new content that wasn’t there a month ago, and that some of what was there has been rewritten to be more useful.

Of interest to many groups might be the Webchat Guide. This will show you how to best link or embed our webchats to ensure your folk end up in your channel and not in #libera feeling a little lost. Remember that Guests often don’t identify to accounts, so if your main channel has set the +r mode, take that into consideration when you introduce a webchat link on your website.

We’ve also carefully crafted you a brand new Catalysts Guide, in the spirit of the philosophy that many of us remember, and which was the foundation of the community we built over the decades.

Other new additions include a FAQ, some information on requesting cloaks, and some advice for those who want to help out in channels.

Once again, the entire Libera Chat team is grateful for your love and encouragement through the challenges of the past few months. Here’s to many more.

One month of Libera Chat

2021-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Web chat and Tor

At launch, we did not have web chat or Tor available, having had to focus on the buildout of the core network. Several of our projects made it clear that these were important features for them, so we cracked on, and now have webchat or a more lightweight gamja and connections via Tor available for use.

Registering projects

We’re incredibly humbled that over 570 projects and communities have chosen to call Libera their home; we’ve had all hands dealing with project registrations, with a huge backlog of tickets to work through. Relying solely on volunteers, we haven’t been able to handle all of them as quickly as we would like to. We really appreciate the patience we’ve been shown, and are doing our very best to fully catch up! With over 750 tickets resolved, there are still roughly 150 open ones remaining, and new ones come in daily.

This does not mean you shouldn’t register your project today. If you have a project or community you’d like to register, view our channel registration guide for information.

Culture and Organisation

But the challenge isn’t just technical. We know that what is most important about IRC is community - tech is an enabler, but ultimately it’s a bridge for people.

We wanted to get the community structure, the governance, and the people bit right too - in how we act, how we are organised, and how we plan to continue providing a relevant and positive fabric for collaboration and community!

We’ve posted and talked already about our structure - a Swedish non-profit organisation which holds the domains and assets. All important decisions must be voted on by the members of the organisation in structured meetings - steps taken to ensure that actions of one person cannot seriously harm the network. You could call it a lesson learned the hard way.

The non-profit organisation has now had its organisation number assigned by the Swedish authorities - 802535-6448. We’ve already made tweaks to our bylaws to optimise the organisation based on our early experience. We are continuing to explore how to optimise and grow, to ensure we continue to be safe, inclusive, stable, and relevant.

In summary

In closing, it’s been an amazing month, and we are all truly humbled by the support we’ve seen from the FOSS community. It was an honour for each and every one of the ex-freenode volunteers to serve the FOSS community for so many years, and we’re truly grateful that we’ve been able to continue to do so here on Libera, after the unfortunate events which made our tenure at freenode no longer viable. We thank all our projects and users for their support, patience and goodwill, and look forward to working with you all in the future.

Keep your eyes on this space, our mastodon, twitter and GitHub presences for future updates, including future plans and in-depth information on selected areas of work and subjects.

Stay healthy and keep rocking.

One week of Libera Chat

2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Hello, Libera Chat users!

It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts. We entered the global top 10 within days, and are the fastest-growing IRC network ever.

This growth is not without challenges: We have managed to finalise registrations of 250+ projects, and we’re getting more and more all the time. Our backlog is as large as our finished registrations! We can only thank you and ask for your patience, and encourage you to register sooner rather than later as we’re scaling out our registration processes.

We’re proud to host projects across the entire spectrum of use cases, from games, to programming languages, to Linux distributions, and even the world’s knowledge. Some of the projects we are now supporting include Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and friends, and of course the IRCv3 Working Group.

Free and Open Source Software communities and projects are Libera’s core mission, and we’re looking forward to supporting those and more; by providing a space for them to collaborate and coordinate development, support their users, socialise, bond with their teams, and form lifelong friendships.

We hope to see you chatting with us soon,
kline

PS: Some other “staff pick” projects we’re excited to show you!

PPS: We keep hearing “we will wait with contacting you as you must be overworked, right now” a lot. We’ve established a ticketing system in order to improve our ability to process requests. Simply send your request by email, you will no longer have to worry about it, we can get back to you easily, and we can plan our capacities better. For more information, please visit our page on project registration.

Welcome to Libera Chat

2021-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.

Most of our staff have joined us from freenode, and we intend to continue its legacy. It was a privilege to provide the FOSS world with a collaborative platform.

When freenode announced that it was joining with Private Internet Access in 2017, the domain name, as well as unspecified other “assets”, were sold to one Andrew Lee via a holding company. Staff were uncertain but assured that PIA was to have no operational influence.

In early 2021, that changed. New advertising was pushed onto the freenode website without warning. The head of staff at the time ultimately resigned rather than explain. In the time since, there have been changes to network operations for which we have received no explanation.

This was the writing on the wall. As a precautionary measure, we began laying the groundwork for what would become Libera.Chat. Our legal home is a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes, and we will never accept corporate control.

Control of freenode infrastructure will soon be transferred to Freenode Limited and its agents. This means your data will soon be available to their personnel. We don’t know these people; neither do most of you. We can’t claim that this is a good or even acceptable outcome, and are loath to entrust your data to a third party, but it appears that we have run out of options.

Together we have built and participated in great communities with IRC, and hope to continue that journey with you on Libera.Chat. We have courageous ambitions for the future of IRC and the communities that we cherish. Please join us on this adventure.