I don't think it's THAT bad. I never in my life used IRC until I had to for the openstack-operators meetings. IRCCloud was easy enough. Then the mandatory nick registration thing happened and indeed I struggled there, but I got over it - people were helpful, there are many options and many people with experience of IRC in the openstack community willing to help.

Maybe Matrix would be better, but I don't think a complete jump from IRC to Matrix could have been done in time (see Clark Boylan's message about this further up this thread). On May 14th when I sent one of the early reports of this issue to this list it was far off and confusing-seeming. By today the move was arguably already very late. 12 days in and there's worry that the openstack channels will be taken over by shadowy forces.

As Joel Spolsky once quipped "delivery is a feature, your product should have it"

Chris

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 4:30 PM Zane Bitter <zbitter@redhat.com> wrote:

On 20/05/21 3:39 pm, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2021-05-20 21:28:26 +0200 (+0200), Dmitry Tantsur wrote:
> [...]
>> This is, indeed, not quite on-topic, but I'm advocating for
>> Matrix, mostly because that's where Mozilla went and because it
>> seems to check all the boxes.
> [...]
>
> It seems, from what little I've read, that Matrix servers can
> integrate with IRC server networks and bridge channels fairly
> seamlessly. If there were a Matrix bridge providing access to the
> same channels as people were participating in via IRC (wherever that
> happened to be), would that address your concerns?

Here's the problem: IRC authentication is a disaster.

Matrix authentication is decent by all accounts.

If you bridge a system with decent authentication to a system where
authentication is a disaster, you get a disaster (see also:
Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy).

IRC works fine for me and you because we made it fine by doing stuff
that has the effect of excluding casual users and new contributors.

Although I think OFTC was always a better choice than Freenode ever was,
the reality is that by moving there we will continue to exclude new
people in this way, plus we'll lose a few of the old people along the
way (and maybe even manage to completely fragment the community, judging
by some of the comments in this subthread).

IMHO by refusing to consider Matrix we are missing an opportunity to
make the community more open while only paying the cost of moving once.
Instead it appears we are going to pay the (community) cost without
getting any of the benefits.

cheers,
Zane.