I was pretty unaware of this drama(not a freenode user)
So I found me this summary to fill me in on the details (hopefully mostly true)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/freenode-irc-has-bee...
This together with the freenode main page/blog (a very defensive one side view of the occurrences) leads to understand the freenode infrastructure/entity is compromised.
I see this as turning into a worst case scenario of a free service that gets taken over and you can no longer trust it to secure your data.
What data were you trusting with freenode? It's almost all public and often logged to a public web server. So you had PMs and your irc password on there. IRC has never been a place for secure communication.
yeah worst case was when freelists was acquired and then all the groups emails where suddenly indexed and made public in their tentative to become a web hub. those had a supposition of privacy, albeit minimal as it was not a specifically secure server, it was definitely not public.
