Turmoil at the freenode IRC network

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a longstanding protocol—or series of protocols—for creating online, text-based chat rooms. While many of the "channels" (as chat rooms are usually called) are highly useful to a wide variety of projects and organizations, including much of the free-software world, IRC seems to have a community that suffers from more than its fair share of disagreements, hostile forks, vitriol, and other types of divisiveness. It is perhaps no huge surprise, then, that the IRC world is currently undergoing another of its periodic upheavals. The largest IRC network, freenode, is embroiled in a messy dispute that has led to the mass resignation of many of its volunteer staff, the founding of a competitor network (run by the former staff), and its abandonment by multiple high-profile projects.

As one digs into the details, though, they will find a number of conflicting accounts of what happened, "The freenode resignation FAQ" gathers a bunch of information in one place and makes for a good starting point. It was written by Sven Slootweg ("joepie91"), who is not directly involved: "I am not a Freenode staffer, and this document only contains information from public channels." He does, however, note that his sympathies lie with the freenode staff. This Ars Technica article provides a somewhat more balanced view of the mess perhaps.

Selling freenode

This episode has its roots in 2016, when Christel Dahlskjaer ("christel"), the project lead at freenode at the time, formed a corporation called Freenode Limited. That company was sold in 2017 to Andrew Lee ("rasengan"), founder of VPN service provider Private Internet Access (PIA). Ostensibly, at least, Freenode Ltd. was formed in order to have an entity that could sign contracts and such for the freenode #live conference; the new owner was not supposed to have any operational control over the IRC network and the staff of volunteers, and freenode users, were assured of that.

At the time of the sale, Dahlskjaer posted a note about "PIA and freenode joining forces". It painted a picture of a harmonious alliance that would not affect the operational side of freenode at all:

Freenode will continue to operate as a not-for-profit entity under the same management, with the same principles, but PIA's involvement going forwards will provide us with opportunities and resources that we could previously only dream of.

At the time, some were leery of the sale and of PIA's involvement in freenode. In that same post, Dahlskjaer announced that she had taken a full-time job at PIA in a dual role as the head of freenode and the director of sponsorship and events for PIA, which probably also contributed to the level of concern. But for several years, nothing changed for the IRC network—it kept running as it had been without interference from its new owner—so those concerns faded into the background.

Changes

That all changed in February 2021 when the logo for another company co-founded by Lee, Shells, appeared on the freenode front page. According to the recent resignation letter of freenode staff member Aaron Jones ("amdj"), the acknowledgments page is normally used for that kind of thing. He said that adding the logo/link for Shells on the site was disruptive:

This was not discussed among staff at the time. This caused some disruption and considerable confusion among staff for months afterward, as to how to handle user inquiries about it, of which we received many.

Ultimately, christel chose to resign rather than explain the situation to us.

A new project lead, Tom Wesley ("tomaw"), was elected by the rest of the freenode staff in April. A blog post in mid-April announced the organizational changes, pointing to a page describing the people and their roles; the blog post has since been removed and the "people" page now reflects the organization post-upheaval. According to Jones, Lee "insisted that we remove" the blog post, without any discussion

As might be guessed, Lee has a rather different take on things. On May 12, he posted a "Letter to freenode" that featured a "timeline" of events (without much in the way of dates) starting from Shells sponsoring freenode for $3,000 per month, which resulted in the logo/link addition to the web site. According to Lee, that led, in turn, to attacks that caused Dahlskjaer to resign because she was "unable to deal with the persistent harassment". The latter is disputed by Jones and others. From there, Lee recounts a power struggle that he had with Wesley for control of freenode, which, at least in part, revolved around the freenode domain-name registrations.

Another part of the dispute seems to center around a project for a new IRC server that some at freenode were working on along with staff members from the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC), which is another IRC network. Freenode and OFTC staff started work on Solanum in September 2020, according to Jones, after the Charybdis IRCd, which had been planned as the next IRC server for freenode, was forked "because of unrelated drama".

But late in April, the test network "which was being used to ready Solanum in preparation for the network's migration to it" was unexpectedly (and silently) shut down. That was apparently done by Wesley, though he has been conspicuously quiet throughout all of the recent uproar. Jones believes legal action (Lee did mention getting a lawyer in his letter) is behind it:

Attempts to discover a reason why were met with silence. Tom [Wesley] has not been able to talk about it, but I strongly suspect that Andrew [Lee] is behind it, and given Tom's silence on the subject, I suspect Andrew used the threat of legal force to ensure it. I have also heard rumours that a gag order was sent to a large collection of OFTC staff [...]

Resignations

Since then, things have spiraled further out of control. On May 19, the staff resignations started being posted; there are 11 separate staff members who have stepped down at this point. Links for the resignations can be found in the FAQ; each has its own account of the last few months (or more), which are, perhaps unsurprisingly, generally consistent with what Jones posted.

For his part, Lee posted a note on the freenode site on the same day that outlined the situation from his perspective. He made it clear that he is in control of the network, since he has been the "owner of freenode since 2017"; his hope is for "freenode to continue to be what it has been". He also noted that the community is paramount: "Freenode is freenode, and it exists for the sake of the FOSS movement."

Libera.Chat

The FOSS community has another option now, however. Many of the resignation letters pointed to the new Libera.Chat IRC network, which was introduced on that same fateful day. Libera.Chat came about due to the freenode mess and it is staffed by former freenode volunteers. It would seem that the founders of Libera.Chat are keen to prevent a repeat of the freenode situation:

Our legal home is a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes, and we will never accept corporate control.

The first week or so for Libera.Chat has gone rather well, it would seem. As of May 25, the numbers for the new network are rather eye-opening:

In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts. We entered the global top 10 within days, and are the fastest-growing IRC network ever.

This growth is not without challenges: We have managed to finalise registrations of 250+ projects, and we’re getting more and more all the time. Our backlog is as large as our finished registrations!

As shown in the IRC top 100 networks on netsplit.de, Libera.Chat has already slightly overtaken OFTC, though it is still well below the numbers for freenode (which is not tracked in the top 100, though it does appear in the top 10 graph). In addition, many different projects have moved or are in the process of moving from freenode to Libera.Chat:

We’re proud to host projects across the entire spectrum of use cases, from games, to programming languages, to Linux distributions, and even the world’s knowledge. Some of the projects we are now supporting include Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and friends, and of course the IRCv3 Working Group.

Over at freenode

Lee posted a rather strident note on May 25; it boasted that "the plan to destroy freenode has failed", though the evidence for the existence of such a plan seems fairly thin. Meanwhile, he claims that there has been an enormous outpouring of good wishes—"tens of thousands of messages of love and support"—from the "silent majority" of the FOSS community that is sticking with freenode.

He suggested that there are only a few projects leaving freenode and that they are doing their users a disservice by forcing them to migrate elsewhere. The projects came to freenode for its users, he said, not the users for the projects. He also claims that he has "hundreds of reports from project leads" who are being threatened with "being canceled" (whatever that might mean in this context) if they do not move their channel(s) away from freenode; he called for a halt to that practice.

One suspects that if things were as rosy as Lee paints them, there would be no need for a posting of this sort. In addition, there would be no need to try to stop channels from publishing their plans to change servers, but there are reports of just that kind of activity on freenode. It would seem that mentioning "Libera" in the topic of any channel on freenode is enough to have the channel taken over by the freenode staff in order to, apparently, keep it running there under new management. It seems that forcing users to go elsewhere for official communication channels is wrong, but keeping them at freenode under false pretenses is ... not.

Wrapping up

This whole saga highlights something that Lee may not have realized when he "bought" freenode. An IRC network is more than just the servers on which it runs. And, for freenode, those servers are being donated by various entities, so they could not have been part of any purchase in any case. Effectively, Lee bought the domain names, web site, and name recognition of freenode. The latter has been severely sullied at this point, at least in the eyes of a large and seemingly growing list of projects and people. It will be interesting to see where freenode (and Libera.Chat) go from here.

There is something of a bottomless pit of links to web pages and IRC logs that crops up as one starts to dig into this affair—and IRC history in general. Even just limited to the current freenode kerfluffle, there are allegations of bribery (with money or revenge), a sad tale of a would-be moderator of the dispute disassociating themselves from both "sides" and, in fact, from IRC development altogether, connections to the Korean "royal family" and to the failed Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange, and more. To an outsider like myself, it is all truly weird—bordering on surreal at times. Those interested should strap in, follow links, do searches on search engines or sites like Hacker News, and make up their own minds.

At its core, the struggle here is about control. The former freenode staff thought they were in control of the network and had policies in place to ensure they were involved in any changes going forward. When they were disabused of that notion, they decided to go elsewhere to regain that control. On the flipside, Lee decided (or was forced, depending on which account you believe) to assume control over freenode, apparently believing that either the staff would acquiesce or that freenode could weather the storm. We are now watching the latter play out in realtime.

One thing seems clear, however: projects should be able to decide where their communication channels live. Even if one disagrees with the reasons for a switch away from a network, the choice of the project should be honored. Confusing users about where to go for help or discussion does not in any way help the cause of less FOSS fragmentation—quite the reverse, in fact.