What I was doing on Freenode was providing a quick answer to questions, and also pointing out that most people had moved, so better answers were more likely on Libera. I never told people to not answer questions. If people wanted Freenode #python to be a lively place, they were welcome to stay and answer questions. They didn't.

Of course, Freenode is free to decide that my mentioning Libera was a reason to remove me. But I didn't see a clear policy forbidding it (though the policies have been changing daily, so I might have missed it). Just as Freenode is free to remove people, people are free to move to another network. And that is what is happening.

My main point in my blog post was not, "I have been wronged!" My point was, "Freenode is doing this to themselves, but it's OK because Freenode doesn't matter."

I know, right? The sheer audacity of Freenode to believe they own the communities of FSF, Arch, Gentoo, GNU, Python and countless other FOSS projects is unfathomable. I just can't believe how entitled Freenode believes itself to be, banning project leaders and performing hostile takeovers of established communities being run by their official projects. It really does blow my mind.

Thinking you can buy a business relationship with millions of people on a network run mostly by volunteers and expect everyone to start operating it and using it for your benefit instead of for the ideals of their 20+ year community sounds a lot more entitled to me.

The whole idea of purchasing a business for its customer base is pretty disturbing in the first place. I as a customer do not consider my relationship with any business to be a transferable asset.

Within IRC culture networks exist to serve the projects and users not the other way around. Failing to understand this is why leenode is losing users in the first place.