It's had a bunch of guises as a website. For a while it was a blog filled with shouting about how removing the administrators will allow for real Free Speech and the future of everything will be freenode (and cryptocurrency, please buy our shitcoin maybe).

https://web.archive.org/web/20210912070004/https://freenode....

It was turned into a Free Speech reddit clone for a bit, which nobody used.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220402191330/https://freenode....

It's now a wiki which refers to the network as "assmode" and implores you to instead join "pissnet" run by the Impeerial Family.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220517234626/https://freenode....

Sort of the death knell of desperately trying to form a community.

Someone was editing that wiki, but to be clear Pissnet is not affiliated with Freenode, though it was born from its collapse. It is a small but active community, and has a couple hundred servers.

https://shitposting.space/network

It's very hard to explain, but it is a real network that currently operates as an anarchic sandbox for doing weird things with IRC software/protocols and just generally goofing around.

Pretty much every single active user is a netadmin. It's the network where you register a nick by linking your own server.

It's back on netsplit's top 100 list at #7: https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

I'm idling in the top 10 channels, it's semi-active in that people pop in and say stuff, but there's no interaction. Most connections are from old bots, or from community pages that haven't been updated.

> from community pages that haven't been updated.

Yeah, I lurk in a community that _also_ has a Libera channel now, but they keep a bridge-bot in the old Freenode channel because all their old videos implore people to join them on Freenode.

It gets a bit of traffic, meaning those folks might otherwise be lost without the bot, so I understand it. It just sucks.

Yeah suffering from that too; we need an internet-wide PSA that people should just s/freenode/libera/ whenever they see/read/hear it somewhere. :-)

It seems to be alive. My client still connects to it. I saw a lot of trolling that seems to have simmered down now. I have had some odd/interesting conversations in the #freenode channel. 417 users in the channel at the time of this writing.