It still seems like things could shake out either way, but are folks planning on moving the nmglug irc channel to libera.chat or stick it out with freenode?
If I might make a suggestion, IRC's model is annoying to many, including a super old timer such as myself. How about creating a Matrix room? There are many distributed chat systems vying for that space, but matrix has shown robustness handling thousands of people at major free/open-source conferences, and is convincing skeptics. Another candidate is mattermost, but I find it harder to get going. rocketchat is nice, but it seems to be losing out in the "market"-share battle. Of course it's all based on free s/w, with no proprietary javascript bits if you run it in your browser. There are also desktop and mobile apps that are free as well.