Just like many others, as of 27 May 2021 the #git channel is now primarily on Libera.Chat. We are not abandoning freenode fully, but several of the more active users intend to focus on Libera.Chat in the future. Feel free to keep using the freenode channel!
Here is our reasoning (mine, actually):
Operation of freenode was recently taken over by Andrew Lee ("rasengan"), owner of Freenode Ltd. (a company that used to exist mainly for sponsoring purposes, as I understand, and which was sold to Lee some time ago).
I don't really know any of the parties involved, so personally (and definitely not speaking for anyone else in the channel, nor anyone from the Git project) I was willing to just wait and see how the "new" freenode works out. However, on 26 May, Lee gave us a taste of what kind of governance to expect in the future, as all project channels mentioning Libera in the topic were banned – deregistered and forwarded to a similarly named topical channel, which however usually did not have channel registration, so this completely screwed over the existing community in the original channel, as no control over the "new" channel existed.
More interestingly, this happened before the rules were updated to let people know they were not allowed to keep a channel while moving to Libera (which is stupid in the first place, but whatever).
Lee has since backpedalled, but my trust in his way of running things is already gone. I cannot, in good conscience, support a network that claims to support open source but then pulls moronic stunts like that, apparently without even really considering the obvious consequences of burning people's trust.
In fact, we had a message in our channel topic discussing the situation surrounding freenode vs. Libera.Chat – and the only reason we avoided the ban hammer is that our message happened to not mention Libera.Chat directly. I would have been significantly more annoyed had our channel actually gotten destroyed – but the mere presence of this kind of Damocles sword is reason enough for me to not want to deal with freenode anymore.
Even worse is Lee's communication related to this. Here are some illuminative quotes from a news entry about the whole thing (via Wayback Machine to avoid any... accidents):
Some more background on what happened:
(Note: the URL of this page is deliberately vague so we can put it in the topic of the original channel on freenode and avoid automatic bans.)
On the most basic level, you just need to set up your IRC client to connect
to irc.libera.chat instead of whatever you have right now for
freenode, and /join #git there. You may also want to register your nickname at
Libera.Chat, so that nobody can take it away from you. As a special bonus,
registered users will hardly ever be hit by any anti-spam measure we may have
to take.
Please see Libera.Chat's website for anything else you might want to know about the network and its rules.