2021 Libera end of year review

by staff

Hello everyone!

As this year slowly comes to an end, we would like to look back at what happened on Libera in 2021 and see what the future might hold for us.

Changes since our last blog post

We have enabled the +w usermode by default. This means you will receive wallops, messages sent to all users, usually about maintenance that will impact you or announcements such as new major releases from projects registered on Libera. If you would like to opt out of these messages, you can unset the w mode on connect.

Stats

We can’t have an end-of-year review without some numbers to go with it. As we got started this year, we don’t have a huge number of stats or any interesting trends to show. Most of these numbers have an implicit “over last year’s number of zero” attached.

We gained one new Libera.Chat! On which we had, at the time of writing:

Projects and communities

Thanks to the great work of the Libera Staff team, we now have over 900 projects and communities registered. While there is still a little backlog left, we now have fewer than 30 open old registration tickets, quite a change compared to the numbers in the hundreds we had in the past months. This makes us confident that, despite the usually very busy holiday season, we should be able to focus on new incoming registrations and handle them more swiftly.

Libera.Chat organisation

We’ve had a few new staffers join the team since starting the network in May. We hope you’ll extend a warm welcome!

We’re always looking to make our policies more effective and reduce the friction they cause you. To that end, we no longer require user/ cloaks to be all-lowercase, and now default to preserving the registered casing. Please let us know if you want yours to be updated to match that. We’ll continue to make improvements where we find them.

Happy new year

One tradition we would like to keep on Libera is the “Happy-New-Year”-channel, where people can share the joy of ascii artwork and best wishes with the community in a more casual, festive atmosphere. The channel #libera-newyears will be open during New Year’s Eve across timezones, hoping to provide happiness and festivities free of the concerns about in-person meetings.

Thank you

We would like to take the time to thank all of our sponsors for providing the infrastructure and support needed to keep the network up, running and reachable. We appreciate the donated hardware, time and the good collaboration and communication with our ops team.

And, last but most definitely not least, we’d also like to thank the Libera.Chat userbase for joining us in this space and bringing your many and varied personalities and interests. Without you, this network would simply be a bunch of servers sending control traffic back and forth; we really do appreciate how many people have chosen to hang their hat here.

The entire Libera.Chat team wishes you a merry holiday season and, if you celebrate, happy festivities. Stay safe, stay healthy and all the best wishes for many more years.