> A note on cancel culture

> I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads on freenode that they are being harassed and are at risk of being canceled if they do not leave, to Libera. This activity does not belong in FOSS. Stop it.

lmfao sure, why not? Claim to be a victim of "cancel culture", and that people moving to Libera are just being forced to do so by the evil SJW cabal (no, we're not giving you any proof).

This whole pathetic statement from Lee on the website really says a lot about what type of person he is.

It's reached the point where I now have a mental heuristic that anyone claiming "cancel culture" is the one in the wrong, and this heuristic is almost always right. It's really just a shorthand "How could I have known there would have been consequences for my terrible actions?!", with said actions typically being completely unrelated to any issues of speech policing (as we see here).

From that link, this:

> I have also received hundreds of reports from project leads on freenode that

> they are being harassed and are at risk of being canceled if they do not leave,

> to Libera. This activity does not belong in FOSS. Stop it.

Smells like a load of bullshit to me. I'm not involved in the Freenode debacle at all, all I know about the characters in question are from the original resignation letter, the Andrew Lee PDF detailing his side of the argument, the articles about the mass cancelling of channels posted here on HN today, the Andrew Lee apology comment on HN about how it was a "miscommunication" and now this on the freenode.net frontpage. So I may be totally jumping to conclusions, but I find it very hard to believe that people would be getting harrassed or bullied into moving away from freenode and that anyone would reach out directly to a VERY controversial at the centre of the whole ordeal. This feels like a way to score a few points by throwing some vague hard-to-disprove accusations at the other side.

edit: the apology in question is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287178, it's "dead" so in case it's not readable by anyone the text is:

"This should have been communicated better and for that I apologize. We published a draft policy update and worked with the community in #freenode-policy-feedback to understand the community's wishes.

The policy was updated today to make clear that inappropriate advertising was unacceptable. As many of these channels were simply wildly unmoderated and closed, yet by protocol standards, "open" under a primary (#) namespace while in "official capacity", we felt it was best to redirect users to an unofficial off-topic (##) namespace.

I apologize for this being communicated poorly. This is entirely my fault, and I take all the blame for that. "

I initially thought "bullshit" on the PDF and the comment too, but each time convinced myself I could just be misunderstanding due to being a bit distant from the situation. Reading the freenode frontpage blew that away in my eyes.

I am user and occasionally I contribute to Allegro.

Freenode attempted to take it over today, and it didn'teven mention libera.chat and it didn't even tried to move yet.

Now it has officially moved.

https://twitter.com/CriadorDeJogos/status/139750445711463629...

What was the topic before the bot changed it?

From that link:

"freenode has been the home for the entire FOSS community for over 20 years. Fracturing the community only hurts users and FOSS. Your users don’t wish to migrate. Stop forcing them."

Does he mean "fracturing" the community as in people using multiple IRC servers? Isn't that sort of distributed nature an _advantage_ of FOSS? Why does everything need to be on one server?

That statement is also simply not true - no accounting of the "FOSS community" is complete without Debian and its influence - in particular the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which became the Open Source Definition, but also Debian itself as a technical work and everything downstream of it like Ubuntu.

And Debian left Freenode for OFTC long ago.

Because he wants to control all of it.

There's small missing part of the story here - many channel owners have been adding full bans before leaving, meaning that noone was able to join the channel and talk about the topic anymore.

Most of those channels got "taken over" and bans removed so people could continue conversing on that network if they would.

That seems pretty reasonable though. If these are the official channels for a given project, then it's up to the project what they want to do with them, not the ops of the network they happen to be hosted on. If Gentoo or whoever want to move their official channel from one network to another, then that's entirely their right to do so, and it makes sense to close down the previous location and leave a link to the new one to prevent confusing people and fracturing the community.

If you want to stay on FreeNode, you can create as many unofficial channels to talk about Gentoo as you want, and you're free to try to recruit users to it. But taking over what had been the official channel, but which is now officially deprecated by the sponsoring project in question, is unreasonable. It's about trust.

The single-# channels were official channels (or grandfathered channels from before "official channel" policy).

That meant that they weren't random chat channels, they were linked with specific organization that handled them (this was done to prevent name hijacking... which is what rasengan just did)

They took over a bunch of channels just for having the word "libera" in the topic. The actual criteria are something more than that, because there are some channels that had it in their topic but didn't get taken over. But that's approximately what happened.

also, a community spread across two channels is more fractured than a community on one. Forcing users out of the old one is a good thing.

Archived link, in case of cowardly edits: https://archive.is/LGsY2

“And any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all.”

He can comfort himself being a true prince nonetheless /s

Another relevant quote from the same show: "There's no cure for being a [expletive]".

Very unbecoming of someone in his position. Seems people were right to be concerned.