Why wouldn't this go the way of Freenode? Who is in charge? How do we even know this already isn't the same as Freenode?
I know addressing a messy past on a new site is no fun / I saw the other articles on HN, but ... they should still address who is running the show and some level of assurances (as much as you can in text on the internet) that this is a good place.
You know how Discord now has a channel for every game or new service that comes out? Freenode IRC has always been like that, except for core and interesting FOSS systems. For example, actual Linux maintainers might be in a #linux channel, and the guy who invented the Nim programming language would hang out in #nim.
The people running the show are those people and friends of those people.
The guy who was f'ing with it was just some greedy guy who got control of the domain name and lied and said he wouldn't interfere with the non-profit activities. But then he started advertising lame services on the home page and messing with the networking etc.
So they fixed it by getting a new domain. Because they are problem solvers.
Original question: "there is not a single name of a real person anywhere on the site that I can find. there is only a reference to ownership by "a non-profit association in Sweden." Is it normal for the staff of such a project to be secret?"
Your answer: "They did address the ownership. It's a non-profit." Not named. And then you had a bunch of stuff about unnamed people who chose not to put their names or nicks anywhere on the site, when the question is "why wouldn't they associated their names/nicks with this?"
The staff are not secret. They have names on the network. Those nicks are published (at least on the old site, not sure if that has been transferred to new yet) and well-known.
The one guy who's name everyone knows is undisputably trying to profit from a non-profit organization, which he previously lied and said he would not, and in so doing has caused the worst disruption possible. So that proves that names don't actually help us.
It reads like (good) satire. The perceived esteem of some of the users are unrelated to the validity/integrity of a company.
Go on.
It will almost certainly go the same way as its gone in the past.