Libera.Chat recently turned one, but we never turned to Libera.Chat. Amid chaos in Freenode we implemented what we had been wanting and planning to do for years, and nearly did two years ago. We wanted our own network, which isn't occupied by 'thought police' with its own blacklist. Last night we reached the one-year anniversary of our migration to our own network, which runs in tandem with transient fallbacks or safety nets (very seldom used).

"We wanted our own network, which isn't occupied by 'thought police' with its own blacklist."Our network has been listed by netsplit.de since December, alongside about 500 others. Unlike all those corporations with their fake hype (they come and go all the time), IRC has been around for a very long time. It predates the World Wide Web.

We certainly hope that more sites and organisations will see the value of self-determination in the speech sense; there will hopefully be tens of thousands more IRC networks out there, not tens of thousands of channels centralised in few giant IRC networks with opaque governance structures and corporate patrons, typically euphemised "donors" (the money tends to come with strings or implicit demands).

Our associate has reflected upon this anniversary as well, noting that "rather than celebrate libera.chat the focus ought to be on the unfortunate demise of freenode; freenode was great and very important for many years, but eventually its main disadvantage, that of centralization, brought down many projects. While some moved to libera.chat, many just gave up on IRC altogether. However, some, and these are the ones to praise, started their own IRC networks. (Re-)Decentralization is the solution to many of the problems people associate with the Internet nowadays." ⬆