OFTC

OFTC

The Open and Free Technology Community is a volunteer-run network that aims to provide stable and effective collaboration services to members of the community in any part of the world, while closely listening to their needs and desires.

You can reach the OFTC IRC network by using a traditional IRC Client of choice, or by the WebChat that we provide. The webchat enables you to connect to the network and chat directly from within your browser.

Connect your client to ircs://irc.oftc.net:6697

To connect securely, use ports 6697 or 9999.

TLS/SSL is supported on all servers. Our server certificates are signed by Let’s Encrypt. We also publish DNSSEC-signed TLSA records: dig _6697._tcp.irc.oftc.net tlsa.

Both IPv4 and IPv6 are available.

Use of Tor is permitted to the address above.

You can also connect to the onion service: ircs://oftcnet6xg6roj6d7id4y4cu6dchysacqj2ldgea73qzdagufflqxrid.onion:6697

(Not recommended) To connect without TLS/SSL use ports 6667-6670 or 7000.

IRC services (NickServ, ChanServ) are available for nick and channel registration. See CertFP for how to configure client certificate-based NickServ identification.

Recent News

July 13, 2025

  • We are excited to announce that we have voted to adopt a new constitution for OFTC! This new version comes after more than a year of discussion and drafting, and as this update is substantially more than a simple amendment, SPI was consulted about the change. The goals of this rewrite include calibrating our governance document with how the network’s process have adapted over the past two decades, and reducing the administrative overhead in our annual elections. The old version is still available for comparison.

    We initiated an amendment vote on June 7, ending July 7, with the outcome announced to staff and the SPI board on July 12. The previous constitution required 3/4ths of NOC and 3/4ths of NetOps to vote yes for the amendment to pass. The final results were:

    • NOC: 7 yes, 0 no, 1 didn’t vote
    • NetOp: 6 yes, 0 no, 1 didn’t vote

April 25, 2025

  • At the end of February we learned that The Matrix.org Foundation required additional funding to avoid decommissioning the official Matrix bridge to OFTC. In early April we were informed of a potential sponsorship that would save the bridge, however due to a serious wave of abuse on the Matrix platform, confirmation of this was not possible at that time. The Foundation has now confirmed that their primary sponsor, Element, has pledged to ensure that the Foundation can continue operating the OFTC bridge.

February 28, 2025

  • The Matrix.org Foundation recently published a blog post stating that unless they raise temporary funding by the end of March, and also solicit further, more sustained funding in the month after that, they will start scaling back operations and discontinue running and maintaining their flagship inter-protocol bridges, including the official bridge to OFTC.

    In the event that they do not meet their ambitious goals, we are providing pointers below to resources so that our users can plan how to proceed, and avoid splitting their communities.

    While there are some forks of the matrix-appservice-irc codebase, we are not aware of any equipped to maintain this as a community fork. However, there are other options, such as Matterbridge which bridges to a variety of other protocols as well, and Heisenbridge which offers a one-to-many bridging option.

    The Matrix.org Foundation has indicated to us that that they will make plans for the worst-case scenario, and we will communicate further as we get more information.

November 01, 2024

  • 2024 staff election results - thanks to Steve McIntyre (Sledge) and Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb) for running the elections as counters this year.

March 23, 2024

  • 2023 staff election results - thanks to Steve McIntyre (Sledge), Alexander Færøy (ahf), and Pierre-Elliott Bécue (peb) for running the elections as counters this year.