I read that article, and there must be stuff that was not included because I still don’t understand for the calls to abandon Freenode.
Can someone explain why it’s being suggesting to stop using Freenode?
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I’ll make an attempt…
Someone, namely Andrew Lee, is trying to claim ownership of the Freenode IRC network through acquiring ownership of the, extremely loosely related Freenode Ltd, an organisation set up for Freenode live events, entirely separate from the IRC network. The only thing they have in common is the name.
Freenode (the IRC network) has always existed solely by the grace of its supporters. Aside from the domain name Freenode doesn’t really have operational costs. The sysops are all volunteers, and all the server power is donated by various third parties.
The whole existence of Freenode is (or rather, was) based on the relationship of the staff with the sponsors (that being the people that provide the servers). Iow, if the staff goes, so does that relationship.
The idea behind Freenode was that it couldn’t be owned, because it doesn’t exist as a legal entity. This avoids agenda pushing (though, of course, the sysops are still humans, with everything that entails. Still it’s as much a meritocracy as is possible, certainly more than anything “owned” by a single entity) Claiming ownership of Freenode at the very least goes against the very idea behind the IRC network.
I can’t think of any good reason to want to “own” Freenode anyway, certainly none that are good. Some power-trip? Ability to silence “unwanted” speech, or people? Selling the user-data, potentially? (but really, what would the information in NickServ/ChanServ be worth?) Forcing the network in a specific direction? (this appears to be one of the reasons, based on some of the stuff Andrew has written)
It should also be noted that, unlike “modern” chat systems all the data you send to an IRC server is visible to said server. Trust in an IRC network is entirely based on the trust in the people operating it. Freenode now being hijacked means that some party with unclear intentions now has potential access to everything that’s being said on Freenode (which includes “private” conversations), among other data (like all the nick registrations with NickServ, which includes email addresses)
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TL;DR: I am speculating.
Person A said Y, person B said in a public forum “you are attempting to bribe me” person A begins removing evidence, but person B being of integrity does not.
Sometimes this is exploited to justify lawsuits.
An unfounded accusation of bribery is just as much slander here as it is anywhere else.
The individual accused of all the bad behaviour is believed by a significant number of Open Source projects to be acting outside of the best interests of said projects. Admittedly such a suit would be nail in coffin, but you never know.
Awesome summary.
I wonder if the support for things like power and throughput will dry up now?
This said, I wonder what percentage of traffic has dropped out already?
I think Ubuntu was the biggest project on there wasn’t it? They moved, other big ones have.
Perhaps this has all been a cost reduction effort? 
I really like that explanation, it has been linked at the top
Has anyone linked JRS’s take on it?
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If anyone needed some more convincing to get the hell off of the husk of what used to be Freenode: policy update (#513) · freenode/web-7.0@1194a3e · GitHub
Simply put, any channel that publicly announces migration to elsewhere gets hijacked by Freenode “staff”. After that anyone can request Founder privileges (friend of my did for a local *nix community channel, where he was oper,but not owner. Dropped the channel afterwards, of course, since we have no intention of supporting the behaviour of the current staff). Meaning now is the time to hijack some former official channels (I hear #ubuntu and #gentoo are up for grabs 
)…
The second diff is quite telling as well, at least I don’t see any good reason to scrap clauses against racism and the like.
On another note, Irssi, one of the major open source IRC clients, officially updated its default IRC network from Freenode to Libera Chat.
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Channel takeovers have started
#curl https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1397433855817170949
#hardenedbsd https://twitter.com/HardenedBSD/status/1397516575561879557
#fosdem https://twitter.com/fosdem/status/1397454352835653632
… just to name a few
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Who needs reality TV?
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During “normal” times, I can see asserting channel ownership as an admin tool, for various legitimate reasons. I don’t disagree with having that mechanism in place for truly abandoned channels or other situations.
That being said, in the last few days, the patterns of behavior point in other directions. I won’t go so far to say that these tools seem to be used in bad faith or for ulterior motives, but it sure looks that way.
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Escalation… what does the new owner actually want to do with freenode? Seems like they’re just ruining it for no reason.
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Well that’s new.
Are they purposely trying to kill freenode?
It has the feel of bullied kid abusing police power.
I’m not sure there’s an agenda, I think this is all ego.
It’s not like he can take over open source just through Freenode.
Thank fuck.
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This is still the case for many modern systems as well; while I can think of many systems (not all of which might be described as “chat”) which use or allow the possibility for end-to-end encryption,
Always on: Signal, iMessage, Whatsapp, Wire, Silent Circle
Optional: Matrix (E2E mode), XMPP (with OMEMO/OTR, maybe PGP?), Telegram (secret mode), Facebook Messenger (secret mode), Skype (private mode)
The suggested replacement for IRC tends to be systems without such encryption, like Mattermost or Discord, or in the commercial realm Slack.
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Oh, is that really a thing?
The reason for this is that it’s a unified experience that’s marketed well, properly maintained and has a plethora of features.
Until privacy chats like Matrix or Wire stop advertising themselves as purely privacy oriented, they won’t lead the race.
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It gives a lot more context to why the volunteer staff resigned. I am going to link it in the op
An interesting curiosity, there was some sort of disagreement at the start of this between Andrew Lee ( rasengan) and Tom Wesley (tomaw) that may have involved legal threats. Between 2021-05-22 and 2021-05-23, tomaw is replaced as head of staff[ing] on the website. In light of this, it seems curious that tomaw has no public resignation letter, and appears not to be part of the Libera Chat group, though as of yet I see no staff roster on its site.
Meanwhile, since at least 2020-05-13 tomaw has been the NOC Chair at OFTC, and before then a normal member of that committee.
I also came across a link to this blog post claiming that homepage ads are not unprecedented for freenode; though the ex-staff may still have a point about not being consulted prior to the ad being added. Since rasengan is affiliated with both the new addition (Shells) and the previous sponsor (PIA), maybe he thought it was not a big deal?
Ad timeline according to archive.org is:
?→2021-01-05 PIA ad
2021-01-06→2021-02-25 no ad
2021-02-26→now : Shells ad
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I added that to the op. You can see the effects of the takeover and the community’s reactions
Jeff Geerling offers his commentary about the situation. Freenode is dead. Long live IRC? - YouTube
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Matrix is the suggested “modern” replacement, at least if we’re talking FLOSS. Closed ecosystems like Discord or Slack definitely do not qualify.
There was supposed to have been a blog post by tomaw, but rasengan supposedly removed it.
FWIW seems to be staff on Libera Chat, unless that’s an irssi specific cloak?:
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- tomaw [tom@irssi/staff/tomaw]
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- ircname : Tom Wesley <[email protected]>
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- server : platinum.libera.chat [Stockholm, SE]
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- : is using a secure connection
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- account : tomaw
27/05|14:17:21 [LiberaChat] -!- End of WHOIS
As an update on the hostile channel takeovers. Apparently a Matrix bridge to Freenode is now a liability, per this GrapheneOS tweet: https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1397561410280988676
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