At the time I wrote that, #startups on freenode was muted, with the topic line (and frequent op posts) stating that mibbit was banned by freenode, and the new #startups is on irc.mibbit.com.

That may still happen, depending on whether freenode learns to actually trust a human being (see the rest of this thread), and on what axod and swombat decide.

Edit: And you can come to #startups on irc.mibbit.com already. :)