A few days ago I heard that the channel called "techrights" on the Libera Chat IRC network had been misusing our name or misrepresenting us. Or rather, a small and vocal minority was making noise unhelpful and counter-constructive, under our name. So I decided to lurk/park there for a couple of days, only to observe abuse and off-topic nonsense (examples here), including verbal abuse against actual Techrights people.

"We're not interested in yet another network exercising control over us."To clarify, the way IRC works (and has long worked), anybody can create a "techrights" channel on any network (there are hundreds of networks that are well known), but what happened with Libera Chat is, a lot of people reconfigured their IRC clients to connect to Libera Chat instead of Freenode, whereupon their auto-join directive would get them connected to a channel called "techrights" in Libera Chat.

But we're not in Libera Chat. We're not interested in yet another network exercising control over us. Nothing personal against Libera Chat; it's just that it got an influx of users parked in a channel called "techrights" due to a state of flux amid diaspora.

If you are mistakenly parked in "techrights" at Libera Chat, please change the settings to the correct network. The real #techrights channel (IRCS or IRC link) is at irc.techrights.org (default clear-text port; port 6667).

As XRevan86 put it, "we have brought up our own independent IRC server for true self-reliance, while maintaining a bridge to our old home on Freenode for compatibility and emergencies" and "the channels on Libera have not been claimed by us, and as such we are not affiliated with them." ⬆