I've been connected to Mozilla IRC for about 20 years. When I first started hanging out on Mozilla IRC I was a grad student at CMU. It's how I got to know a lot of Mozilla people. I was never an IRC op or power user, but when #mozilla was getting overwhelmed with browser user chat I was the one who created #developers. RIP.

I'll be sad to see it go, but I understand the decision. Technologies have best-before dates. I hope that Mozilla chooses a replacement that sucks less. I hope they don't choose Slack. Slack deliberately treats non-Chrome browsers as second-class — in particular, Slack Calls don't work in Firefox. That's obviously a problem for Mozilla users, and it would send a bad message if Mozilla says that sort of attitude is fine with them.

I look forward to finding out what the new venue is. I hope it will be friendly to non-Mozilla-staff and the community can move over more or less intact.

http://robert.ocallahan.org/2019/04/goodbye-mozilla-irc.html