We also got a number of channels totalling a few hundred names hijacked from chanserv, because of 'libera.chat' in the topic. No contact, nothing. We aren't even a F/OSS project, but a hackerspace. 10 years of a chanserv registration, gone, just like that.
The irony is that we were planning on a progressive transition to Libera via bridging to make sure everything went smoothly for everyone and that we didn't split the community. Now, well, there's nothing to do but just move cold turkey.
If anything removed any doubt about whether we should have moved to libera, this is it. There is no going back now, you've erased any trust that I or any project members had for "freenode".
Our channel was still moderated by all of our original project staff while recommending other members move.
To say that "many of these channels were simply wildly unmoderated and closed" to justify an indiscriminate automated action is ridiculous.
This network is run by the old staff that Andrew Lee evicted last week to seize the network. Libera cares about foss and will help you transition your project.
Someone "bought" Freenode, kicked out the existing staff, who formed Libera chat as a result. The new owner of Freenode then speedran self-destruction of the site, first banning every channel that mentioned libera in its topic, and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch.
This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
You missed the part where all of the channels who moved were given reason to move.
Nobody makes like a tree and leaves unless they're just pissed off with the way things are now. People don't enjoy making work for themselves.
So no, Leenode wasn't meant to let their channels become pointers, they should have not taken several actions which caused Libera to need to exist in the first place.
The great thing is, the visitors are what make the communities on IRC, so if people want to move server, they just do, there's no need to even talk about it other than to inform visitors that Leenode is actively trying to prevent communities from notifying their users that they've left for greener pastures.
I don't really care to get involved with the whole debacle, I'm just someone who goes to odd communities for specific subjects from time to time. Other than dropping my account on Leenode and recreating it on Libera, I'll just update my server URL and carry on with my life.
What? No. Our hackerspace decided that we should probably maybe move our IRC channels to libera.chat but have a grace period, generally do things carefully and slowly. We had 'moving to libera.chat soon' in our /topic, set by myself in haste just to let people know that we are aware of the Freenode kerfuffle and that yes, we will likely move over.
Then we lost control of our IRC channels on Freenode, because someone from Freenode took it from us. No-one member of the hackerspace has control over it anymore. That's a hijacking.
This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look.
Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all.
If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent).
If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2]
That particular incident was the moment when the staff all resigned.
They had already seen it coming and had made preparations. All the important things have moved to a new domain:, see: https://libera.chat/
Once the dust settles, basically what's effectively left to say is that everything that made freenode great will be renamed to libera.chat; whilst an imposter will (sadly) be left in control of the old freenode.net name.
The story has been breaking over the past few days.
Wikipedia has links to news stories:
No, many of those channels were not already closed. #xmonad was still very much active on both sides as we were waiting for libera.chat staff to process our community registration, and there was just this tiny little mention at the _end_ of the topic that we're in the process of moving.
Still, freenode kicked us out anyway this morning. Luckily the Libera staff were able to process our registration quickly afterwards.
This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Regardless of your opinion of IRCCloud, banning all IRCCloud users right after launching a competing service and hearing criticism is not a good look.
Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all.
If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent).
If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2]
See also: the way freenode went under. Some asshole seized power, and then nothing happened for a bit. Then staffers got replaced as they got too uppity. Then a bit later anyone mentioning libera.chat in official freenode channels got kicked. Then the mods of any channel mentioning libera.chat in the topic got replaced. And then there was no one left as everyone had moved over to libera.
It's pretty strange to me that there are still channels hanging around instead of moving to libera.chat, but it is actualky probably good that they are kicking them out. Doing everyone a service, this way pretty soon no one will be able to be confused about which is the correct network.
I was quite relaxed about the whole thing and was willing to give Lee a chance, but mass purging channels and forwarding them to ## namespace, and deleting their topics...
#go-nuts had libera.chat mentioned in the topic... saying that they were on libera.chat as well "if freenode dies". Suddenly every user was forwarded to ##go-nuts, the topic empty, #go-nuts invite only ; that certainly is a classy way. This was the official golang support channel, no warning, nothing. Can you understand what kind of breach of trust that is? How can you host a support channel on Freenode for any kind of official project, if that's what they're doing?
I was k-lined on Freenode for repeatedly pointing out in one of the hijacked channels what had happened. This is _not_ something I ever considered doing, but it was so unfair. People being forwarded to an unofficial support channel not realizing what had happened.
Freenode staff are very aggressive about taking over channels in order to limit exposure to this whole fiasco. And they go way overboard. From the beginning my impression was "this is ops fighting, and who knows what's true, hopefully things will calm down", but the way Lee handles this? Like a privileged, rich, socially inapt teenager. Every new ounce of information released on freenode.net reads like what I would have written with 16. https://freenode.net/news/for-foss is this the person you would entrust your official support channel for an OSS project with?
I still don't know what's true and what's not. And I can see both sides of this. Libera will first have to prove itself, and so I hope channels will also consider switching to OFTC (which promises far less trouble, and more stability at this point), but Freenode definitely is not trustworthy anymore. It's pretty much as simple as that.
I meant I had assumed the libera.chat staff still had admin status in freenode, and had been behind this move, but apparently they all got removed a week ago.
To be fair, I rejoined most of the channels on Libera AND stayed in the Freenode channels to keep an eye on them (until they wiped all accounts overnight, didn’t re-register).
Well that's easy. After the initial kicking of the old admins a community split was looming because not every project cared that much and some worried about the hassle of changing networks.
But Lee sped things up considerably by deleting all user and channel registrations, leaving his last holdout supporters at the mercy of randos that happened to be the first to join the channel.
That was basically the last drop and libera is now exactly like freenode was before he started stirring trouble. Only one or two projects went somewhere else (like alpine which went to oftc).
But libera is just as well run as freenode was before the incident and after a month or so it was already like it never happened. Nobody even talks about it anymore, it's just over and done. It's the best outcome possible IMO. No dragged out legal battles, no months of toxicity. Just problem solved.
Kudos to the admins who proved they were right all along and have the chops to run a network efficiently and create a great atmosphere without conflicts. And the new organization has a legal framework to prevent such a thing from happening again.
Something tells me Reddit won't go that easily. Not only because there's no exact replacement ready (lemmy isn't really it) and because the management isn't likely to shoot themselves in the foot that badly.
#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.
It's worse than that. IRC has no login by default, and the first user to join a channel becomes the sole operator (nickname and channel registrations are a layer above, but those databases are now blank, so all their records of persistent ownership are gone).
Since he pointed the same domains at a new network, that means now a random user of every channel, upon reconnecting to the network, has now become the sole operator and is now free to register said channel and take control over it.
So it's not even that this allows random people to register channels; this is literally appointing a random user as the new owner, for each channel. Oh, and if that user quits without registering anything (and any other users joined in the interim), the channel is now opless and orphaned and cannot be moderated, registered, or otherwise controlled without admin action, unless all the other users leave.
So if you owned a channel on the old network with more than 10 or so users, there is a ~0% chance you'll be able to own it on the new one without help from the admins, unless you got extremely lucky and you were the first user to reconnect among the people in your channel, or unless whoever won the oper lottery is nice enough to give it back (and this being IRC, probably half the users are idle bouncers, so there's a good chance they'll be unresponsive, if not outright malicious).
This was actually an issue for Libera too, as people switching their Freenode configs wholesale wound up creating channels that didn't exist yet that they'd been a member of on the old network. But this time it's global, not just individual users changing their config, so it's infinitely worse.
Ouch! I idiotically deleted my account thinking that there was a risk it was about to be swept up by a VPN company. I don’t use IRC much anymore so I logged in for the occasion. I’ll admit I don’t honestly understand what did and did not happen very well, but the narrative that drove Libera Chat’s adoption is now bothersome, as it created an imperative to immediately stop using and delete Freenode accounts, and now it seems like the timing of which information got out was itself dishonest in order to strike first. Even if the majority of people still side with Libera Chat, I will now have serious trust issues with them as a network.
This whole situation is bad and I hope it becomes clearer what happened and why.
The irony is that we were planning on a progressive transition to Libera via bridging to make sure everything went smoothly for everyone and that we didn't split the community. Now, well, there's nothing to do but just move cold turkey.
Great job, Andrew Lee.
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