Not sure if anyone else has been following the news around freenode IRC (largest IRC network afaik) and its 'takeover' by a Korean guy who claims to be heir to a past monarchy. What a shitshow. Reminds me of the GAF/RE split tbh.
The timeline basically is:
- freenode had been happily running for like 20 years as a chat network mostly centered around the open source community
- Person running it sells it to this Andrew Lee guy in 2017 ostensibly to fund some live event for the community (this bit is unclear), obtaining an ultimately meaningless promise from him that it'll run as-is going forward.
- Fast-forward to a couple weeks ago and Lee lets the freenode 'staff' (unpaid volunteers for the most part, both on the server-side and moderators) that he'll be assuming more control of the network and his past promise is their imagination.
- These long-time contributors assume the worst and decide to split off and form another network with the original principles, warning others of a nebulous danger ahead with Lee at the wheel.
- Lee, seeing this kerfuffle and exodus by a considerable number of users then pulls an Evilore and begins forcibly taking control of channels that merely mention the spin-off network in the topic, removing the original mods (ops). Then writing a news post not even mentioning this and acting like everyone but him is to blame. He also set up a script to block anyone mentioning his username in various channels.

- This backfires badly and caused many sitting on the fence about the situation to now decide to move to the spin-off network, including major channels like Wikimedia, Ubuntu, and others (they had no choice anyway since he'd booted their ops).
Guy
could have let the dust settle and come back from this but now freenode is bleeding users
