They could've reached out to channel owners, informed them of the policy (change/reinterpretation) or reminded them of it, and ask that they change the topic. Set a clear expectation, like 48hrs to resolve it, and then act. They could've even used a server wide notice for it. A little courtesy goes a long way and would've helped build up a bit of trust in the new staff.
None of that happened. Whether they believe they were in the right or not doesn't matter at this point. Trust in the new team was already low. Based on what we know, this also wasn't staff action, but just Lee. These actions also further cement the stories ex-staff has told, which only serves to damage trust in the new team further. What little trust there might have been is now gone and it seems to have galvanised those who remained to also leave. Which in itself completely defeats having ownership of the network.
Yeah, and the 'staff' that quit could have not quit and tried to resolve things amicably.
> None of that happened
You don't know that, you assume that.
> Whether they believe they were in the right or not doesn't matter at this point.
On what planet? I think the actions were reasonable given the circumstance. Taking a position of outrage because some perceived red-tape wasn't followed, that's unreasonable.
Nobody suffered any real harm. None of this is a huge deal, but people want to play victim.
I don’t have to assume that at all. We’ve got hundreds of accounts of open source maintainers and communities of what happened. Their channels were taken over for mentioning Libera in the topic. No warning was given or possibility for redress before the takeover would happen.
If that didn’t happen like they said, then congrats you’ve discovered a massive conspiracy there. But then again, it should be trivial for anyone including the new staff to provide logs to the contrary.
> Nobody suffered any real harm. None of this is a huge deal, but people want to play victim.
Do you honestly think that all the maintainers of 250+ open source projects all "want to play victim"? Really?
You need to come to terms with "I was both in my right to and had reasons to do what I did" does not mean everyone has to be a-ok with it and play along to accomodate your decisions. What Lee did was monumentally stupid and short-sighted from the perspective of anyone caring about a project-related community they maintain on IRC. Why should they keep using freenode? Because nobody suffered any real harm yet (fwiw, you don't know that, you assume that!)?
Google could tomorrow bounce all emails to free gmail accounts that do not come from gmail and demand payment for letting them through. They would be fully in their right. It might sound like a great idea for making some $ numbers go up this month. People would not be "outraged" because Google stopped doing something for free that they had no obligation to do. People would be "outraged" (read: baffled, and scrambling to cut the service out of their lives) because it would be an incredibly braindead move.
...except that has been the written policy. And then after channels were forcible taken over, they changed the policy to remove any mention of this.
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