On Freenode, Libera, and the r/sysadmin IRC Channel
Good evening, friends. Some of you already know, and others may have seen articles and headlines around the drama surrounding the Freenode IRC network in the recent days.
In short, on 19 May 2021 many of the volunteer staff at Freenode resigned in protest in what has become, essentially, a hostile takeover of the Freenode IRC network. The official IRC channel for this subreddit, #reddit-sysadmin, was not immune to this takeover.
While we were unsure of the future initially, we made sure to register and stand up a channel on the new IRC network, founded by many of that same volunteer staff that resigned from Freenode. In an effort not to split the community, we extended our existing chat relay bot to include the channel from the new IRC network. This meant that 3 separate services - Freenode IRC, Libera IRC, and Discord could all communicate together regardless of which mechanism the user chose to use.
The channel topic on Freenode was changed to express this change, stating that the channel "was relayed with Libera and Discord". No intention of moving, closing the Freenode channel, or anything like that was stated or implied.
Last night, around 10pm Central, a bot on the Freenode network began forcefully de-registering channels that had the word 'Libera' in their topic. Many, many FOSS projects were affected by this forced takeover by the new Freenode staff, and many of those projects have made the decision to leave Freenode entirely.
For more than 11 years, our IRC channel on Freenode has been a place for members of the community to chat, share stories, seek help, poke fun, and just be a place for like-minded folks to congregate. We plan to continue this in a new home, on Libera.Chat, and already have nearly 200 users in the channel!
A big thanks to everyone for their patience, understanding, and support. We were all surprised, like so many others, at the rushed, hostile actions of this new controlling entity behind Freenode's IRC network, and hope to keep the same (or more!) momentum going in our new home.
For those interested, you may find us at irc.libera.chat in #reddit-sysadmin
Hope to see you all there!
Posted May 27, 2021, 1:04 AM UTC
After reading what went on, I can't say I'm at all surprised by the actions of Freenode. If anything, it just adds weight to all the ex admin's stories
Any reasonable person or persons, in assuming control over a decades-old online service such as the Freenode IRC network, would take a calculated, well-planned, and well-communicated approach to massive, sweeping changes.
Instead, they changed the channel registrations of dozens and dozens of established communities - and we're talking some big-name places like Wikimedia, Ubuntu, and RedHat's official IRC channels - in a forced takeover because those channels dared to mention the name of a competing network.
Their repeated behavior these last few days, and the actions they took last night, finally tipped the scale for me. I even changed my email and password on my Freenode account, and dropped the registration of my nickname entirely.
and if you're in a reasonably large, well-established channel that has not yet formally announced that you're migrating, I can guarantee you that there is someone with a freshly-purchased Freenode Admin powers lurking in there waiting for the barest excuse to take control.
Fuck rasengan aka Andrew Lee, Crown Prince of Jellybeans, and all of his grubby little minions. There are a few names I recognize running around with brand new
freenode/staffhostmasks, and I've made mental notes to completely abandon any amount of respect that they may have previously had in my eyes.One of the new staff is a former regular from our channel, who was banned along with others for racism, bigotry, and other hateful type content and behavior.
I can only imagine how bad the others are.
Given how, when Mr. Lee changed the policy on channels to 'allow' him to just take them over he also removed a bit on hate speech (source) I'd imagine pretty bad. He's also started insisting what's happening is an example of 'Cancel Culture' so, you know. Yikes.
I vaguely remember one of the channels I live in banning rasengan himself for being a giant prick a few years back.
Compare and contrast with the only now-former admin I recognize by name, Fuchs, who always seemed to be in the random channel I'd join for help, and helped me enough times that I probably owe him a paycheck or two.
Yup, we had at least 300 people in #prometheus, it's now toast. We had to get emergency help from Matrix (shout out to them for being great about this) to un-link the freenode bridge so our Matrix side could work again.
I've only got one channel left on freenode, as soon as I can get that un-linked from Freenode, I'll be moving that somewhere else as well.
I was chatting with the nice folks on #btrfs, then the room got closed and operators de-oped, no warning messages, nothing.
Freenode is dead for me, to just erase a channel like that speaks volumes on how much they care about OSS projects and freedom in general.
Freenode has been shit for years. The fraud surrounding the PDPC was disgustingly bad, and was symptomatic of the culture of those managing the network. Children and grifters, the lot.
Lol. Most sysadmins I know do not fit this description.
Any reasonable organisation would protect their organisation from hostile takeover.
The root of this problem lies with the previous incumbents, who are now bemoaning their fate, letting Andrew Lee gain control. How the fuck did they allow that to happen?
A lot of the blame lies with those people. I wonder if they are going to do better governance with libera.chat.
This just demonstrates a lack of understanding about what happened. The admins never, at any time, had the power to stop that. Before any of this happened there was a LOT of effort spent trying to STOP THIS from happening the way it has, but it was more important to Lee to be in charge than anything else. It's straight narcissism.
that and money. he threw money at the head admin with an understanding that it was to support the infrastructure needs and stated Lee would not be involved in the operations or anything else. he lied of course, and here we are.
So explain how Christel Dahlskjaer was able to sell the company to Andrew Lee without any oversight.
There lies a major and serious failing in governance.
This has been a train smash waiting to happen since Robert Levin died and the decision to dissolve PDPC was the final straw.
They aren't "bemoaning their fate". They literally rebuilt from the ground up already. Yes, the way the domain registration was handled for freenode was not entirely safe. You basically need a lawyer in order to form a nonprofit with proper governance, and freenode only needed a formal organization for the domain name (their only legal asset, as all server hosting and staffing was on a volunteer basis). To prevent this, they would have needed to form a legal entity such as a non-profit, with the assistance of a lawyer ($$$$), at a time when whoever the domain was registered to would actually transfer ownership to the nonprofit. I don't know if this could have been done, maybe there is a time they could have done it. It would have had to be done when whoever the domain was registered to was definitely loyal to the project. That way, when the rest of the volunteers ask them to transfer it to the nonprofit, they would. If the relationship was starting to sour already, asking them to sign on the dotted line would simply kick off this takeover that much sooner. What they needed was for the FOSS pro bono lawyer community (which is necessary for anything FOSS to deal with legalities) to be involved LONG before anyone thought this was going to be an issue. But if you didn't think it was going to be an issue, why take the case pro bono even if you believe in freenode's goals? Libera, on the other hand, has a organization with a board. Because they won't make the same mistake.
Oh yes they were, and are, vociferously.
And the douchebag has the gall to cite "cancel culture" because people are leaving a network of free minded individuals that didn't want to be part of a hostile takeover. I'm at a loss for words for how mind-blowingly stupid that is.
If people disagree with you, it's clearly you being cancelled. There's absolutely no other reasons why that would ever apply. /s
In soviet russia, the culture doesn't cancel you, you cancel the culture!
I would have been more sympathetic toward them if they weren't taking hostile action against channels on their platform that have been there forever for communicating their presence on other chat networks. It kind of doesn't jive well with the name "freenode".