TL;DR: Use this link to start chatting in the #arduino IRC channel right in your web browser.
For many years now, there has been an active community on the #arduino IRC chat channel. It's a friendly and great place to get some interactive help with your project or just dicuss things Arduino, electronics, microcontrollers.
Until now, this channel has been running on the Freenode IRC network, but the channel has been moved over to the new Libera.chat network this week, so we welcome everyone there. For anyone already running an IRC client, connecting to the new network is as easy as using another server name. There is no web-based chat from Libera available yet (should be added in the coming weeks), but you can already use the kwiirc.com open source web IRC cilent already (see link below).
Server: irc.libera.chat
Port (TLS): 6697
Channel: #arduino
Web-based chat: using kiwiirc
More info: https://libera.chat
As for some more background on the move: In the past months, there has been a conflict between the Freenode staff team volunteers and the Freenode Ltd, which lead to the entire staff resigning at Freenode and starting a new chat network. As always in such conflicts, there is some conflicting information, contradictory views and a lot of nuances to be made and what not, but after polling for thoughts in the channel, the #arduino channel operator team judged that Freenode would no longer be the best place for our channel. We created a new channel on the new Libera network and requested existing users to move over. This morning, the new Freenode staff has forcibly closed down the #arduino channel (and apparently a lot of other channels too) on the grounds of violating the Freenode innapropriate advertising policy by asking our users to move to Libera in the channel topic. This action seems to have removed any remaining doubts about the move, and forcibly removed anyone from the old channel, finalizing the move...