The free-software world did much of its everyday talking on IRC. Kernel maintainers, packagers, and documentation people kept channels on Freenode, the network that had hosted open-source development in one form or another since 1995. A project’s official IRC presence usually meant a registered channel there, and at its peak Freenode held something like 80,000 users across 40,000 channels. The address irc.freenode.net was trusted infrastructure, as routine as a mailing list.
That trust rested on a small volunteer staff, and behind the staff, ownership. In 2017, head of staff Christel Dahlskjaer moved the network into a company, Freenode Limited, and transferred it to Andrew Lee, founder of VPN provider Private Internet Access. Volunteers say they were assured the buyer would stay out of operations.
A change of ownership
In early 2021 that assurance frayed. A dispute over control of the network and its assets ended with most of Freenode’s volunteer staff resigning. On May 19 they launched Libera.Chat, explaining that the Freenode domain and other assets had been sold to Andrew Lee and that operational control was moving away from the volunteer staff. Libera was organized as a Swedish nonprofit association intended to prevent the same kind of single-owner control.
Channels followed their people
The projects did not wait for the dispute to settle. Arch announced its move on May 24, and many other free-software projects shifted their official channels to Libera over the following weeks. The important unit of migration was not the IRC protocol or even the channel name; it was which network the project’s own maintainers told users to trust.
What actually moved was trust. The channel names were re-registered on Libera.Chat — the same #python, #ubuntu, and #gnu — because the people who ran them followed the staff and maintainers they knew. Documentation links, webchat widgets, and IRC scripts all had to point somewhere new. Documentation links, webchat widgets, aliases, and IRC client configurations all had to be updated so that newcomers followed the project rather than the old network address.
Freenode still runs, but at a much smaller scale than before the split, while Libera became one of IRC’s largest networks. A current IRC network tracker shows Libera with tens of thousands of simultaneous users and Freenode with only a fraction of its old population. That is the strange part of the story: the famous name survived, but much of the community investment went where the people went. A network’s value was never the URL. It was the accumulated conversations and trust that traveled with the crowd.