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[video width=480 height=340 webm="http://techrights.org/videos/freenode-sky-falling-fallacy.webm" poster="http://techrights.org/videos/freenode-sky-falling-fallacy.gif"][/video]

Summary: Personally-motivated and overloaded statements would have people think that Freenode is dying or dead; beware such misinformation, whose purpose is likely a self-fulfilling prophecy propaganda war

IS Freenode collapsing? Nope.

Is it losing users and channels? Yes, it does.

But how many?

"Freenode is still by far the biggest network."Back in March a bunch of corporations and their corporate media (funded by these corporations through advertising contracts and more) told us that everybody hated Richard Stallman (RMS) and that the FSF, which he had founded in 1985, was doomed.

How wrong were they [1, 2]. They lied! Again! They keep doing that.

Here's what the usage charts of Freenode looks like (and yes, it's up to date, updated daily as far as we know):



IRC in general isn't peaking, but it's still there. And Matrix isn't replacing it but complementing it (there's bridging in place for compatibility).

At the moment a bunch of corporations and non-corporations (projects) are deciding on a lesser of the two evils. Some of them leap to another network which they barely even understand!

It's mostly managed by a Swede, based on GitHub history, and that's why it's Sweden-based. It's not about free speech or privacy, so don't be easily misled by words like "Libera" (or neo-liberal), as they're enforcing rules akin to "blasphemy law". They're not about freedom; in fact, their site is hosted by Microsoft, they manage the site with Microsoft proprietary tools, and they're putting their code in a proprietary Microsoft monopoly. Do we want Free software projects to embrace this sort of dependency? Microsoft can use all that coercive power to tell the network which users or channels to ban. Heck, the staff there uses GitHub for communications (as if a blog isn't good enough), so it's not unthinkable that aside from privacy abuses there will be intelligence by Microsoft on more than just projects in GitHub. It's also worth noting that several of the people who now work for that network signed the letter which demanded cancelling RMS. Not a good sign, is it? Some of their staff was reported to us as manipulating communications by means of censorship/bans and intelligence/surveillance. That was way back in April when people coordinated strategies for canceling the founder of the Free Software Movement.

The video above mostly deals with debunking the falsehood about the future of Freenode. Falsehoods aren't cool. The video shows some Freenode stats and full context (compared to other IRC networks).

Freenode is still by far the biggest network. ⬆