About a month ago, due to Mozilla's plans to discontinue Mozilla IRC, we released RFC 0351: Chat Vote and started a public vote on which chat platform to use for the Rust Embedded Working Group in the future.
The winner of that vote was Matrix, with 160 votes, followed by IRC with 103 votes and Discord with 74 votes. As Matrix has won by more than 3 votes, it will become the new official chat platform for Rust Embedded! The name of our new channel is #rust-embdded:matrix.org, and you can join it right now using a client like Riot.
We will be trialling the new Matrix channel for the next two weeks, using it as our primary and official communication channel. After the trial period, we will evaluate any issues that came up during it, and decide how to proceed. More details about the organization of the channel can be found in the operational notes.
Since IRC ended in second place, and it's our current platform, we'll also be establishing a bridge between the Matrix channel and IRC during the trial. This way, users have the option to continue using IRC if they so desire. To avoid the administrative overhead of having to switch bridged channels later, we will bridge directly to the #rust-embedded channel on Freenode, not to the Mozilla IRC channel.
While Matrix is a federated protocol, we are not planning on running our own infrastructure for now - instead, we will be using the matrix.org IRC bridge, and users are free to register on matrix.org or any other homeserver of their choosing. If this turns out to be a problem during the trial period, we may reconsider this decision.
We're also looking into a static log viewer, that would allow us to publish search-engine-indexable channel logs for public reading, similar to the public logs that we currently have. This may require us to self-host a static log generator such as matrix-static. Suggestions for other solutions are welcome!