That's not an accurate representation of the freenode situation: freenode was taken over, the old staff disagreed with the decisions of the new owner and left to create Libera.Chat, and then the new ownership started banning people and taking over channels for talking about Libera, changed the server software, effectively deleted the nickname database, and is producing really delusional messaging, such as https://freenode.com/news/introducing-irc .

That's Freenode, which it seems is what the GP comment is thinking of. Freenet is unrelated.