The Fall of Freenode

Oh man this is leaving out so many shady details. Freenode was not and has never been a single entity, it's a collection of volunteer staff operating donated servers. Somehow under shady circumstances Freenode got sold to Andrew Lee. How this is even legally possible for something as nebulous as freenode isn't entirely clear. In any case Lee ended up with control over the freenode DNS, and with freenode being fully dependent on donated resources could hardly sue Lee for the ownership of the domain name.

Some complex internal politics happened, Which I'm not entirely clear on, which allowed Lee to install his own staff. This pissed off a lot of the original staff which moved to make their own IRC network instead.

Users were largely in the "watch and see" camp with respect to this takeover. However with Lee making wilder and wilder moves --such as forcibly taking over any channel mentioning liberachat in the topic-- the userbase pretty much all decided to move over to liberachat. The move was surprisingly drama-free in my experience. I updated my config to connect to all the same channels on a different server and was met there with all the familiar users and moderators.

Freenode limped along for a bit, but with all the technically knowledgeable staff having left would suffer from worse and worse outages, until it collapsed entirely. There's some pretty hilarious graphs out there documenting the collapse[0]

Lee isn't the crown prince of Korea. No such nobility exists anymore, except in the minds of a group of people with some creative interpretations of the law.

From my perspective at least it's pretty clear Lee was looking for a fiefdom, not realizing that trying to forcibly hold an IRC network together is like trying to keep sand in place with sticky tape.

[0] http://www.hinner.com/ircstat/Socip_F_3.gif [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/IR...

The author draws parallels to Twitter

> The events leading to the fall of Freenode are eerily similar to the ones happening to Twitter today. A look at the fall of Freenode.

...