The notification about the new IRC channel was not caused by any Namecoin-related internal conflict. Anyway, regarding our internal conflicts I tried to find a solution and even offered in a chat with the contributor yanmaani to bury the hatchet with "Jeremy Rand" aka biolizard89 for the case of his public excuse for his repeated misconduct - with the result that he fully sided with J.R. and even adopted his manner 1:1. As a result, I finally banned yanmaani from the IRC channel. The question of a fork came up again in one of our Telegram groups. By the way, the reason for this conflict is also the same reason why the Namecoin project is considered dead from the outside.

About the TLD .bit we had it earlier. There wouldn't be a problem registering the .bit TDL even in the regular ICANN namespace. It's just a question how the browser plugins etc are handling the DNS resolution. This Chinese project can take and copy which pseudo TLD ever, it won't affect Namecoin and it's usability in any way. That Namecoin is not really user friendly is well known and I regularly even get requests on Telegram how to get the Core node connected as no peers are found for days. Only after manually adding several peers the synchronization starts. But in the end, Namecoin is indeed epic and the most established blockchain DNS service, secured over the Bitcoin network, see e.g. the 🎊 10 years Namecoin 🎉 notification for details.