looking at fake korean royalty andrew lee's empty burnt-out husk of a 'freenode' IRC network that he's put probably thousands of dollars into taking over and now tacked a slop 'news' site onto, and well

I can only say that it greatly amuses me to see it completely devoid of any legitimate project channels, or users for that matter, and that apparently even everyone's favourite christofascist cryptobro, luke-jr, has fleed to discord for his shitty bitcoin fork's project channel

was it worth it, andrew? was it worth it

guy actually spent a good chunk of his Private Internet Access money on buying the definitely-can't-have-been-cheap irc.com domain(!), proclaiming he was going to take IRC into the future, and if you look on that domain now

it's a half-baked web IRC client whose only server connection options are freenode and freenode

and for that, mr. "I am the future of IRC" wrecked an important FOSS community and sent its operators through weeks of intense stress, while putting overtly bigoted cronies in charge of his own operation and driving away FOSS projects to other IRC networks and, in some cases, off IRC entirely forever

this is what it looks like when a wealthy power-tripping waste of space decides to do a hostile takeover of a community, and I'm glad that his venture crashed and burned

#irc #freenode

@joepie91
he did "create" the future of irc, just one he is not part of and is heavily despised in

anyway, I boosted a PSA last night about bmail, which is apparently one of his new ventures: https://norden.social/@CIMB4/117007897771987945

do not use bmail. nor vp.net, which is another of this ventures. now you know what kind of person is behind it.

@charlotte it's kind of impressive, really

@charlotte sometimes when I'm feeling hopeless about fighting power in general, I think back to the freenode debacle because it proves that you *can* fight back, even when your budget is fuck all - despite his bags of money, despite trying to bribe everyone in sight, we successfully defended the community from being taken over (this was definitely not a certainty at the start!) and andrew lost not just piles of money over it, but also any hope of ever being legitimately recognized in his personal 'place of nostalgia'

@joepie91
it helped that freenode's operators were part of the community also

@charlotte definitely. it would've been much harder to convince communities to move along to libera if it hadn't been for nearly the entire operator team being the ones setting it up.

but even then it still wasn't a certainty, because it turned out that a lot of people running channels weren't necessarily very personally familiar with the operator team or the situation, and so quite a lot of campaigning and communication work was needed to paint a clear picture of the situation that andrew couldn't weasel his way through with bad-faith arguing

I have had *a lot* of conversations where people were genuinely unsure of who the legitimate operators were, or where people were being very... centrist-y "well we're not going to move unless things get so bad that it starts affecting us directly", which of course would de facto became a vote for andrew, having control over the domain

@joepie91
i think that is a major difference between forks/splits from the original project that succeed vs fail. in that people that directly participate in the original project are willing/going to jump ship makes it more likely for such a split to be successful

@charlotte I dunno how close you were to what happened so you may or may not already know this, but basically most of the organization wasn't happening in public spaces but via informal private conversations and things being relayed, and a lot of people had to put in a lot of work to fight andrew

@charlotte definitely, 100%

@joepie91
i mostly looked at it from afar fair

what i'm saying it is that libera would probably not been as successful if it was operated by a completely new team

@charlotte oh, definitely

but if it were, then it would be a fork rather than a move-as-a-result-of-a-hostile-takeover-attempt, so also a very different situation