Every channel on Freenode that mentioned 'libera' in any capacity has been joined by a bot, had the topic renamed, ownership removed, all users deopped/unvoiced and all bans cleared.
Something that was against Freenode policy... until yesterday.
They also nuked private channels that were being used for Wikimedia and Wikipedia's editor communications.
That's not an accurate representation of the freenode situation: freenode was taken over, the old staff disagreed with the decisions of the new owner and left to create Libera.Chat, and then the new ownership started banning people and taking over channels for talking about Libera, changed the server software, effectively deleted the nickname database, and is producing really delusional messaging, such as https://freenode.com/news/introducing-irc .
#blender got hit too, tho interestingly enough, not any of the sub-channels (none of which had 'libera.chat' in the topic) were hit.
This seems like it is very bad timing on the part of freenode staff... with many communities already on the knife edge about switching, this is likely to push plenty of people over.
Freenode was “acquired” a while back, people were looking on it dubiously.
Then last week (or the week before) volunteer staff resigned en masse saying that the new owners were planning on taking control of the project’s direction. A number of projects using freenode for chat started looking at alternative just in case.
As GP notes, this looking around was done in the heat of all the resignation, but was not necessarily a done deal for all projects, after all nothing has changed yet.
Today, freenode highjacked / locked hundreds of channels mentioning libera (the alternative network set up by some of the resigning staff) out of nowhere, proving that the network most definitely could not be trusted anymore.
In case you missed it, last week the staff running freenode for 20 years were evicted by legal threats and the sudden change in how the network is run is because of new management.
While I agree that Libera is New Freenode and Old Freenode is rapidly dying a death, this whole episode has soured me mightily against Freenode as a whole. This should never have happened in the first place and the blame for it lies squarely at the OldFreenode/Libera admin's feet, not whichever outside actor took advantage of it. The admins are an "old boys network" - not chosen by the community, or elected, but simply in-group appointment - and while Rasengan is certainly a loose cannon, I have seen enough chatlogs to note that "the admins" are not innocent of power-tripping and favoritism either.
If I were starting an IRC channel for a free software project now, I would put it on OFTC, which has a real governance model with elections and - mysteriously - also manages to be drama-free.
So much this. Yesterday I did a walk through the ~44 channels I frequent on FreeNode and came up with about 20ish that where moving to either OFTC or Libera. I left those channels, keeping ~24 channels that were not likely to move off of FreeNode.
Fast-forward today. All those channels are moving now, none left! Yesterday this could be considered a 55/45% split and had new FreeNode staff taken a win-trust-dont-rock-boat approach, I'm sure the network would've been fine.
Yesterday I was staying on FreeNode, because I don't really know the thinking behind all parties involved and could see the possible reasoning on both sides. Today I'm disconnected from FreeNode and on OFTC + Libera.
Just a few days ago he popped into friend's Twitter thread about similarities between Freenode and Twitter situations, and announced that it was Libera Chat that conducted a hostile takeover against Freenode.
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