Sure, the communities have moved on. This is what Lee did not understand. freenode was never something he could own.

freenode was communities of people. The servers were donated, provided by people in the communities who wanted a reliable network. The staff were members of those communities, developers for those projects, and all volunteers. The users never were freenode users, they were ubuntu, and debian, and ham radio, and gimp users.

There was nothing to OWN.

And now that someone who has no clue about any of this does, they leave in droves.