OFTC is Becoming Bigger Than Old Freenode (Libera.Chat)
THE number of known IRC networks of considerable size (by the standards of Andreas Gelhausen at netsplit.de) has fallen well below 500 and after Libera.Chat pulled the plug on Matrix we're looking at about 31k Libera.Chat 'users' left (some are bouncers and bots, not actual humans). Libera.Chat, which gets censorship/moderation wrong (probably a topic for another day), is down to no more users or barely more users than OFTC.
This is particularly interesting because the Freenode/Libera.Chat crew kept on top for well over a decade.
See the image below. █