The Freenode Drama
In case you had not heard, it recently became apparent that Freenode had a (new) [owner] known as “Andrew Lee” (aka rasengan) and a lot (if not all) of the original staffers resigned and created a new network called Libera.Chat.
rasengan repeatedly reassured users (during his hostile takeover) that he wanted the best for the FOSS community and Freenode. (Besides the fact that his hostile takeover was anything but beneficial to freenode, it’s users/channels/groups/projects/history/etc.) While I understand that he has used his lawyers to take control of the network (hence the “hostile takeover”), he immediately started adding his new staff which was particularly interesting. You only have to look at some of the names and an interesting pattern begins to appear..
On Tuesday, May 25th, 2021 rasengan decided to quietly alter policies and then sent a bot to forcefully takeover channels that mentioned Libera.Chat in the topic. This included over 700+ channels. This included my former project’s development channel, #Xtheme. It confused some users who began asking me if Xtheme was re-opened for development and expressed confusion.
As a side note: Not only did the bot use oper-overrides to op itself, but it also used OperServ to op itself. (WTF?! I mean, learn how IRC works before you have someone write you a shitty-oper-takeover-bot.)
No matter what our former channel (or new ##Xtheme channel) says, the Xtheme Development Group has not resumed development — and we continue to urgently recommend that all FOSS projects and channels move to Libera.Chat. The new owner of Freenode also has taken to their website news pages to whine like a 14 year old, that people do not trust in him and are fleeing. (Despite the fact that he has given so many reasons not to, PRIOR to taking over channels!)
rasengan will continue gutting freenode until the corpse of the network is no longer interesting or suitable for him or his array of IRC purchases (ruins): irc.com, snoonet
GET OFF FREENODE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE