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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

We should stop implicitly legitimizing Andrew Lee's power grab by referring to his dominion as "Freenode". Freenode is a quarter-century-old community that has changed its name to libera.chat; the thing being referred to here as "Freenode" is something else that has illegitimately acquired control of Freenode's old servers and user database, causing enormous inconvenience to the real Freenode.

cheapie has coined the name "Leenode" for this abomination. Let's start using it!

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I complained vigorously about the acquisition to freenode staff at the time, due to rumors that Lee and Falkvinge had acquired freenode in order to attempt to surveil private security issue discussions between Bitcoin developers in order to further the high profile cryptocurrency scams they were participating in.

I was consistently gaslit by freenode staff. The current story that this sale is all a surprise is a direct lie. At the time I got nothing but platitudes about how PIA just had freenode's best interest at heart, etc.

I'm sure not every staff member was in on it but the claim that it was Christel is just not true. I don't see how anyone regards freenode staff as trustworthy at this point.

The time for long time freenoders to defend freenode was in 2017.

The admins knew this was going to happen, people need to stop spreading misinformation pretending that they were caught off guard.

You were gaslit through heavily controlled communication? Say it ain't so, that must have been awful.

I can't believe someone would use money to take over a productive communication forum to manipulate the information there for their own gain. What kind of awful dishonest person would participate in something like that?

I would expect anyone knowledgeable enough to work on bitcoin that wanted to keep a secret wouldn't be talking about private things over IRC of all places.

To further reinforce the fact that he intends for it to be his dominion... the incident the submission refers to?

<rasengan> I apologize for the poor communication and few erroneous channels that were caught up, freenode. This was my mistake alone.

He admits fault for the targeted dissolution of 700+ channels that, coincidentally, contained "libera" in the topic.

Maybe go with UK news' terminology for ISIS: "so called Islamic State (as the group called themselves that, but we're far from university accepted by Islamic communities and were not officially recognised as a state).

So we now have the "so called freenode". Freenode in name only.

"Leenode IRC network"?

What I don't understand is what is Lee's motivation for doing this? He'll just end up in charge of a bunch of dead channels with all the staff and communities gone. I don't see a profit motive - is it pure vandalism?

I was curious about that myself. It doesn't make sense.

I like how you think if you should want to register leenode.net and forward it to freenode its available.

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