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.
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:
Summary: Essentially this is an attempt of freenode.net to redirect people who type in libera.net instead of libera.chat. Libera.chat is a fork of freenode.net that formed in response to a controversial change in leadership in May 2021.
Freenode's management changed. Libera.Chat is a new organization with new servers not associated with Freenode -- but many organizations that had previously maintained IRC channels on Freenode are moving to Libera.Chat.
It's not over. It's alive and well, it just happens to be named "Libera" these days. The only thing 'rasengan actually bought was the rights to the name (including the domain registration) and, indirectly, a user base of forgotten bouncers that will be reconfigured next time they're used.
Thankfully, the open protocol means it's just a one-line change to move over to irc.libera.chat , run by the same people as ran freenode until last week, carrying on in the same spirit.
Libera is an IRC network too! It's run by the same people who used to run Freenode! I agree it shouldn't have happened, but everything is intact except for the name "Freenode." It's not like they moved to Discord or something (well, there is also a very large Python Discord, but the IRC channel is around too).
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.
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 .
the freenode irc network disappeared overnight, but everyone just updated their links to point at libera.chat instead, which has almost all of the same projects, active users, etc.
It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode.
the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
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.
Not that I disagree, but doesn't sound like that's the issue here? The issue is that there's been a hostile takeover of freenode.net so the admins have established an network on a new domain for its communities to migrate to, libera.chat.
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.
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