Freenode Continues to Shed Off Servers and Users, Good Thing We Abandoned It
Much greener pastures for us, outside the clutches of oppressive censors and tyrants
We left Freenode in 2021 and started our own IRC network. It has done OK since:
Contrariwise, even in 2026 Freenode continues its collapse - to the point where whole nodes are taken offline (fewer people or activities going on):
Yesterday and again earlier today someone protested what had been done to Freenode. The protest was in IRC and the protester had no known identity. To quote the opening: "For decades, ever since the founding of the Freenode network, it has always been run by a bunch of volunteer staff without much issue or drama. They more or less kept to themselves and only stepped in to fix technical issues and deal with DDoS attacks and the like, and maintained a good working relationship with the channel ops of most channels. Sometime during 2017, Christel, the head staffer at the time, created a legal corporation to own Freenode and sold it to Andrew Lee. She told everyone that it was done as part of a legal requirement to sponsor a conference and that Andrew would have no control over the operations of Freenode, and nothing would actually change. Now, when this happened during 2017, Andrew Lee didn't really have a reputation for anything except for being the guy who also owned Private Internet Access, a VPN company with a ok-ish reputation. There were some fishy details, like how Chris also got a job at PIA out of it, but nobody thought much of it. Andrew is an important character that we will revisit later."
It goes on and on.
Freenode lost its independence in 2017. Like IBM, it took a few years before the "bluewashing" equivalent began. In 2021 it became apparent that PIA (Lee) was trying to "monetise" Freenode and it was against the interests of communities in Freenode.
Let Freenode be a cautionary tale: you cannot sell communities. It leads to chaos. █
Image source: Cornflower