Specifically looking for freenode? Pretty sure the channel moved to libera chat.

Ah, then details for that I guess...? I'm updating the community page on https://clojure-doc.org and trying to fix broken links... https://clojure-doc.org/articles/ecosystem/community/

Don't know anything about archives, or who manages the channel. All I know is a couple years ago some guy gained ownership of Freenode and started deleting channels he didn't like, causing huge uproar in communities all around. All the staff bailed from Freenode and built https://libera.chat/ to replace it. Immediately a mass exodus of all the channels, and now I think the Freenode servers are mostly purged. I logged into a Libera server and connected to #clojure and found a semi-active chatroom. About 200 people logged in I think.

Good to know -- thanks, @U90R0EPHA! It's been a long time since I last used IRC.

(I may just defer the community resources page to the http://clojure.org page since it has a good list of communities, including mentioning libera.chat)

IRC feels so incredibly limited now. Not even a decent way to properly delineate "code" from other text. Linking to external paste bins is essentially must for anything more than like 1 line of code.

There are many who feel IRC is still better than Slack -- I'm not going to judge 🙂

There are many ways in which IRC is undoubtedly superior. But the main purpose I have for it is communicating with a public community of developers about the hows, whys, and philosophies of writing code. My personal experience, after trying to go back, is that Slack's features give a much better user experience for my use case.

there are plusses, though, to IRC. Slack gives you basically zero moderation tools and you can do a lot more with IRC

but that might just be an argument for, say, discord, instead of IRC

Yeah, I guess it depends on who the User in "user experience". 😉

moderation tools also extend to the non-admin. like I can't block someone

and beyond that, admins not having moderation tools means that a lot of iffy behaviors slide by because there's no way to moderate other than banning or deleting messages

which makes the community a worse place for everyone

Slack is built for companies, and in companies there are other methods of discipline when people violate policies

it's convenient for people in communities to use it because they already have to have it open for work and so adding one more server isn't a big deal

so I guess what I'm saying is that Slack likely became more common for communities not for having the best features (other things can do all Slack can do and more) but by being good enough in the feature department along with network effects from using it at work.