There is currently a war being fought, and its playing out on one of the oldest IRC networks

Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access VPN (PIA) has performed a “hostile takeover” of FreeNode, one of the oldest IRC networks. You may or may not have heard of IRC, but it is the precursor to most modern chat applications like Discord, Slack and many others. It is extremely barebones with support for nothing except plain text, although still used by many including myself for its added privacy, freedom and the general openness of the protocol.

Andrew Lee, the aforementioned entrepreneur, has been sponsoring FreeNode since 2013, and in 2017 started providing servers and owning part of the networks operations. Not much was known about this until May 19th when admins of the FreeNode network sold the 26 year old network to Andrew, which has made the community around the network quite scared for the future of the network.

Old FreeNode admins and operators who have left their jobs have started a new network called LiberaChat. LiberaChat aims to be free as in freedom like the old FreeNode, but the new distrust of FreeNode and its new owner, who has a corporate mindset headed for the network, like monetising it with ads. Old members are scared that it is becoming just as privacy-invasive and censored as the proprietary alternatives, which use their own protocols and are not compatible with one-another, like Whatsapp, Discord and Telegram.

FreeNode is now being attacked by DDOSing and by spam in the channels, all advertising Libera, or generally the story about FreeNode’s takeover.

A message sent out to all FreeNode users about the current drama

The future is uncertain for FreeNode, but the community is very sure on its opinion..