The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat, but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a more complete story will emerge.
I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat.
With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service is more clearly documented and understood by everyone.
At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit they have established should be clearly displayed on the web page somewhere.
We're talking about networks and communities here. Those aren't as interchangeable as things we buy.
That's because we are ensconced in a framework of corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses happen all the time.
Isn't that exactly who they're aiming for though?
Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed solution is basically to do this out the gate.
Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC funded chat service with lots of users and a looming prospect of having to be profitable without losing them.
Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather used it to set up new events like freenode live.
When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require real names.
Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their community there trust the entity running Discord.
I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity behind them.
I was never talking about the community on top of a platform, but the platform itself.
That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the persona and back to the person behind it. A single person can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains this kind of gaming of the system and so makes trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.
This is not to say that the costs of using real names outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of establishing trust is just wrong.
Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title, etc ...
The other way around also works (e.g., Facebook has all the impressum and contact pages you want, but it's the least trustful tech company out there).