Freenode was a very popular (for its target) irc server used by a lot of open source projects and communities over decades.
Freenode was managed by volunteers without any official organisation. A couple years ago, the person that the volunteers considered their "head" informally made a UK company that would own at least the name and domain name, merely out of a wish to have some legal structure instead of random staff users owning random parts of it. How much of it is owned by the company is very vague, staff are not on contract, servers are loaned without any paper signed by third parties, ...
Then recently, that head sold said company to Andrew Lee's company, who made the promise to the staff to not involve himself. Then that head pushed for profits ads on the website, with no warning nor explanation, and with the profits going to said company. Staff complained a lot, head is removed from the freenode staff and then removed from the board of the company she had sold.
Conflict of management erupts, and was justified freenode having no clear admin structure. But Lee comes out of it acting as if he was the boss and owner of the entire platforms, ask that servers and users data gets transferred to him. When staff rebels and refuse that, he "removes them", which ends up with the hilarious moment of him asking them to de-op themselves (remove their admin status) which he can't do himself since he doesn't even have the authority. On several occasion he claims that "the board of freenode voted to have you removed", while he means the board of his private company freenode ltd (which the staff have no relation of any kind with), and he is the only member of said board.
Most of staff agrees about a need for a proper structure, but refuse to see everything transferred to an opaque and for profit company. Lee argue that's it's the only solutions. Several head of major communities or projects hosted on freenode make the suggestion of transferring the control and data to an official not for profit like the FSF and Lee and staff being given the lead in the interim to a proper governance.
Lee reacts by trying to "bribe" some of them with admin powers and/or financial sponsorship for their project if they side with him, which goes terribly wrong, and them saying "Now I will never have anything to do with Freenode under Lee anymore".
That's a summary of the event as understood by me. It seems the governance issue was real, but it also seems one side is saying "it should be owned by a non profit with clear governance and clear rules for data protection" and the other side, Lee, is saying "all the data and admin privileges should be given to my for profit that doesn't report to anyone else than me".
Frankly, while there is gray on both side, his action made it pretty clear that I wouldn't want any of my data in his hands.