Yesterday the Ubuntu Communications Council had our bi-weekly meeting. I brought this up during the meeting to establish what our view is on IRC, given that there are community members interested in helping maintain it.
The very brief answer is that we still intend to deprecate IRC for official purposes (and only for official purposes). I thought perhaps we would change our minds because of the community effort that popped up, but we agreed that wasn’t the best way to go after discussion.
However, that is a very nuanced answer that is also very easy to misread, so I’ll elaborate a bit more below.
First off, “deprecation” is kind of a misleading word here, since it implies that rooms are going to be shut down or otherwise become no longer usable. That is not the case here. For existing IRC regulars, moderators, and people seeking support on IRC, everything will continue to basically be business as usual. A few services Canonical hosted might go away and need community-hosted replacements. Ubuntu Governance will be generally less aware of what goes on in IRC-land than we’re aware of what goes on in Matrix-land and the like. There might be less users coming there since we won’t be advertising IRC as an official support channel, though I kind of doubt the new user influx will drop much. Other than that, everything should just keep working like it’s working now. So if you’re an active IRC user, and you like IRC and want to stay there, that’s perfectly fine, and there will still be a place to stay.
Second off, this deprecation applies to the Ubuntu community in general, but not necessarily individual sub-communities. If Xubuntu for instance wants to continue to advertise IRC as a first-class citizen for how to get support or talk to developers, they are more than welcome to do that, and IRC will remain fully supported from their perspective. It will be their responsibility to maintain their spaces and keep them in line with the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, potentially without as much outside support from the community.
Thirdly, the shutdown of Canonical infrastructure isn’t the only reason the Communications Council wants to deprecate IRC. Another core reason is that the governance side of the community just isn’t on IRC as much as we are on other platforms. I previously was a regular IRC user, as was every other member of the Ubuntu Communications Council (possibly with the exception of Ian?). We just… aren’t anymore, and maintaining an IRC setup in addition to everything else we do is a burden that many of us don’t have the time to deal with. Without Ubuntu governance overseeing IRC, it’s difficult for us to maintain Ubuntu’s goals for a communication platform (adherence to the CoC, spam protection, good moderation, etc.), and without a strong enough community presence there to keep us on IRC, it’s difficult for us to justify staying there. Communities do move between platforms, and due to both technical difficulties and the overall better UX of Matrix compared to IRC, we tried to add Matrix on as an additional platform and the community ended up mostly migrating there instead.
In summary, what @leftyfb suggested is what will happen. Ubuntu governance doesn’t have the bandwidth to maintain the platform, and Canonical isn’t going to be hosting services for it, so it will be handed to the community for them to maintain if they care to. It will become more-or-less like the Ubuntu Hideout on Discord, an unofficial platform that users are welcome to use if they want. All the channel founders, operators, etc. will stay exactly the way they are now.
To answer @lotuspsychje’s questions, there isn’t much to document since IRC won’t be an official platform anymore. If there are volunteers willing to maintain the platform, have at it. There will be an announcement post about this topic that will mention more specifically what services will be going away, so that you and others know what you need to host if you want to keep things running as they are. (I’d list them here but I don’t know what all they are yet :P) The existing channel mods, admins, and Libera staff should be able to help you finagle things with channel moderation and ownership if it’s necessary. (If you need help for some reason, for instance to tell Libera staff that it’s fine for them to make a particular change you need made, we’re very likely willing to help there too.)