Hi everyone! As I'm sure most of you heard by now, Freenode's staff has had a falling out and it's been recommended by their staff that projects consider the network a hostile entity. I won't go into the details here, but those who are interested can read up here:
https://lwn.net/Articles/856543/
At the moment, the vast majority of IRC channels for various Freedesktop and X.org projects currently reside on Freenode. While the X.org foundation doesn't have any official policies on IRC hosting, because of how frequently IRC is used by various projects in our community we on the board decided to make a non-binding recommendation on an IRC network we think would be good to move to. We're also looking at ways to provide some resources to help channels move en masse. We hope this will enable interested projects to migrate to the same new IRC network in order to ensure they're all in the same place.
After considering Libera and OFTC as options, the board settled on recommending OFTC. The primary reason for this is because OFTC is associated with our parent foundation SPI, and has a long and well known history of involvement with the open source community. As well, the board believes OFTC's current Governance model is a lot more clear then Libera's.