If you haven’t heard, FreeNode recently underwent a major event. There’s a ton of information out there, but the best compilation I’ve seen so far is here. LWN also did a nice writeup.

LWN has a good summary of what happened, so I won’t recap it here. That said, I feel like we should have seen this coming back in 2017. The sketchy sale of the network should have been a big red flag, but given that Lee actually left the network mostly alone probably quelled any fears at the time.

I moderated one channel on FreeNode and lurked on a dozen others. The shift has been interesting. I don’t remember the exact date at the moment, but it seemed like we woke up one morning and everything was in chaos. Some channels moved right away. Some still have not. Nearly every established channel, however, setup channel reservations on LiberaChat right away, whether they ended up using them or not.

I am part of the moderator team for FreeNode/##networking and now LiberaChat/#networking. It’s been an ride so far. Right away there was confusion on whether the channel on LiberaChat was ##networking or #networking. The former made sense according to FreeNode policies, but LiberaChat’s are looser, so there the latter makes more sense. Some rando the moderator team had never heard of before grabbed registrations for both channels. One of our newest members got the ##networking registration transferred to him, but we’re still in the process of getting the other one. This outsider says they’re not interested in “taking over the channel” or disrupting things, but they so far have not transferred ownership to one of the original mod team members. That said, they’ve not been causing problems yet, so it’s sorta in limbo.

We’re leaving the old channel up and working both - as are some of the other channels I lurked in. For the most part, however, I’ve left all the FreeNode channels (except ##networking). I suspect I’ll leave that one at some point as well.