Are there articles available that sums up "this Freenode drama"? I've just seen the headlines, and haven't really bothered before now that I see they are acting up as (even bigger?) assholes.
> Contract or no contract, staff and developers of Freenode maintain that it wasn't actually possible to sell the network—the staff is all volunteers, and the infrastructure itself wasn't owned by Dahlskjaer in the first place.
So who did own the infrastructure, and where did they stand on all of this?
> Freenode has been the world's largest IRC network since 2013, with roughly three times as many users as its closest competitor, IRCnet.
...
> A week after Lee's effectively public announcement of ownership and de facto dictatorial operation of Freenode, the staffers who resigned from Freenode created Libera.chat as a replacement.
Is there something wrong with IRCnet? Usually when the largest X does something that gets a lot of users to leave they go to X's largest competitors since those are already up and running and experienced. In this case, though, it seems like the brand new Libera.chat is where most are going.
All hardware was owned by various organizations acting as "sponsors". But at this point most of it might have been replaced by servers owned by Lee.
One of the sponsors, whose server hosted freenode's email server, pulled out shortly after the volunteers left.
I'd say they're just trying to rebuild their old house. Once all the dust settles in a few months, I expect Libera Chat will be pretty much the same as FreeNode was, with all the same channels being run by the same people, with the exception that I'll have to register a new account with NickServ.
I guess that gets into a semantic (or even existential) question: if it's in a different place, and the original house is still there (if damaged and usurped), even if it is built identically, is it the old house, or a new one?
But yes, that's also a perfectly reasonable way of analogizing Libera.chat, as I understand the situation.
A better analogy would be: Let's say you've been going to the same book club for 15 years now, but the cafe you've been meeting at has closed. So the group picks a new cafe and the book club continues. Not much has really changed; it's still the same people, meeting up regularly for the same person.
So just to continue extending the analogy chain, it's closer to there being a café where lots of book clubs hang out, with a hands-off owner or some kind of employee cooperative actually owning the business itself, but through legal shenanigans, someone else gains control of the café business, and wants to drastically change how it's run. The staff all walk out and work on starting a new café down the street, and several of the book clubs follow because they like the atmosphere.
In 2017
> Network staff quit in response and started Libera.
In 2021
Edit: that said, I was unaware of the statements from Lee that are linked to by an arstechnica article linked elsewhere in the comments. Honestly really not sure who to believe. For all I know (which is nothing first hand) this could be another group sabotaging things to boost their own new network over personal disagreement. Which I'm not suggesting is the case, but as someone not personally involved, all I see is conflicting hearsay.
That's when people on all sides pack up shop and leave.
like removing a subreddit's creator/moderators and taking over it.
Communities consist of people, and you aren't allowed to own people, so you cannot own a community.
This would be like if you found out the local little league basball had been sold. It's a community resource that only exists through the continued donation of time by the members. It's not something that should ever be "owned".
If he didn't change anything for the users (kids and parents across the US), but cleaned house in head office and installed his own management team, the local teams would continue running as they always had. The owner really would benefit from the goodwill of the community and really would "own" it in a meaningful way. Some grumbling idealists would start a new "really truly non-profit" competitor, but for most people the friction of switching would be too great. But if he interfered too much and made the players' experience worse, people and teams would find it attractive to move to the new competitor.
https://hackaday.com/2021/05/20/freenode-debacle-prompts-sta...