Dead is overstating it. The maintainers are moving new feature development to a Rust rewrite, weechat-matrix-rs, but still accepting bugfixes/etc to the current Python codebase

Hmm. Given we got here by talking about people who can't (rather than won't) run heavyweight GUI clients, a Rust rewrite seems like it misses the point.

That is, I'm sure it makes sense for them, and for most of their actual users, because Rust is nice, but if I have an m68k machine, too bad, there is no Rust for m68k (unless I'm reading the platform support chart wrong) and so this rewrite likely orphans me.

Now, if for a Debian channel, even a Debian channel about an attempt to port Debian to m68k, then I have no doubt your users all have something less stupid, maybe ARM or x86-64 or even PowerPC. They prefer a non-GUI for their own reasons but ultimately Matrix is an option.

But if you're a channel for actual m68k "classic" Amiga you might actually have a non-trivial number of users for whom "it doesn't run on m68k" is a showstopper. They have an IRC client today.

Rust doesn't target barely-capable archaic platforms like Motorola 68xxx or 80286 and I don't think it should start. But that means we have to accept that a Rust client won't support those platforms.

I'm not seeing classic Amiga on Python's supported platforms either: https://www.python.org/download/other/

I doubt it would perform well even if you did get it running.

So this isn't a change in platform support.

Fair point.

weechat-matrix is really not a dead project. the maintainer works for Element, and is working on matrix-rust-sdk (and thus weechat-matrix-rs), but weechat-matrix is alive in well and in no way unmaintained or dead.

Okay, but I'm not going to go through the effort of setting up weechat-matrix if I know I'm going to need to later throw all that effort away and switch to weechat-matrix-rs. I'll just wait for the latter. It is, for my purposes, dead.