I’d be inclined to agree with this take, seems sensible, although I’d also think the removal of freenode could be very reasonable given their actions have at best demonstrated extremely poor judgement to the detriment of users, or at worst maliciousness.

The other thing could be a freenode use flag that would mean freenode isn’t included unless the user includes it in their use flag? Might be a bit too much work for marginal gains though

Chris

From: Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2021 10:21 am
To: Michał Górny
Cc: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Should we switch IRC client defaults off Freenode?

>>>>> On Wed, 16 Jun 2021, Michał Górny wrote:

> We've moved our official support channels from Freenode to Libera.chat.
> All that's happened afterwards pretty much proves that this was
> the right decision. Maybe even to the point of saying that staying
> on Freenode would be dangerous to our users (e.g. because of the late
> NickServ impersonations, ops with bad reputation etc.).

> However, there are still IRC clients in Gentoo that default to Freenode.
> I think the next questions we need to answer are:

> 1. Should we be proactively changing the default network in IRC clients
> (provided they have one) from Freenode to Libera.chat?

Yes. IMHO Freenode is no longer a reasonable default.

> 1a. If yes, then should we also make a change if clients default to
> network other than Freenode?

No.

> 2. Should we be proactively *removing* Freenode from the network list
> in IRC clients (provided they have one)?

No (but also don't re-add it if upstream decided to remove it).

> 2a. Should we be adding Libera.chat to the list even if we do not remove
> Freenode?

Yes. We have our channels there, so it is reasonable to have the network
in the list.

Ulrich