freenode is a popular network of IRC servers aimed at open source projects and technical topics. IRC is "internet relay chat", it's a very simple protocol, you

freenode is a popular network of IRC servers aimed at open source projects and technical topics. IRC is "internet relay chat", it's a very simple protocol, you can even telnet into an IRC server. Though there are lots of IRC clients that make it much nicer to handle multiple channels and direct messages and so on. IRC was super popular from the 90s up until Slack showed up.