Not entirely sure how many people here are particularly engaged with the tech/FOSS/IRC community, but holy flipping crap, the collapse of freenode is absolutely stunning.
Background for non-technical people:
IRC(Internet Relay Chat) is an internet chat protocol that was invented in 1988 and is still used today, largely for discussion of tech projects, FOSS(free open-source software), and miscellaneous other topics by (not entirely, but increasingly so) techies/power-users.
Freenode is an IRC network founded in 1993 which (until very recently) was a major hub for tech groups (basically the people who maintain/operate/develop much of the public internet), but in the last few weeks, it's undergone a hostile takeover by this guy called Andrew Lee(who is also a pretender to the Korean Imperial throne???). Since buying out the holding company for freenode, he's essentially staged an authoritarian coup and purge of large parts of freenode's staff.
A solid portion of freenode's staff have since resigned in protest, and moved to a new network called Libera, and were swiftly followed by the overwhelming majority of the tech projects on freenode (most linux distributions, Wikimedia, many open-source software projects). Freenode has implemented a script targeting anyone who so much as says the word 'Libera' on the network. In the last day or so, people have discovered that NickServ(the bot which takes usernames/passwords) went offline and was replaced by a bot owned by.....someone (unclear exactly who, or even if they were on the staff team), and details about what exactly happened have not been forthcoming.
See thread:
https://twitter.com/plainoldchair/status/1402685764937338881Graph of relative population on the top 10 IRC networks:
Probably not of much consequence for the vast majority of people here/on the internet in general, but I can't overstate how absolutely bonkers nuts this is.
