Libera is run by the same staff as ran freenode for years, until Andrew evicted them last week. We care about foss and if foss projects want to move from freenode, we will support them.
What's to stop, in 10 years, what happened to Freenode happening to Libera? Is there something concrete in place, or is it on trust? On trust is what happened with freenode.
Who runs Freenode and how it was managed was never really 100% clear, until now. On the other side, this is Libera:
> Libera Chat is a Swedish nonprofit organisation, feel free to read our bylaws. The organisation is run entirely by volunteer staff who are the members of, and have equal voting power in, the organisation. Libera Chat’s purpose is to provide services such as a community platform for free open-source software and peer directed projects on a volunteer basis.
So, as a common FOSS organization, Libera is governed by a non-profit instead of owned by a corporation. That step feels like a pretty good stopgap from enabling the same thing to happen again.
I'm glad to see the Libera folks _finally_ holding themselves accountable to some form of documented agreement (the Bylaws), though sadly it took a major, harrowing event like this. One of my major gripes with the old Freenode staff has always been how capricious their judgements were and how insular they were with each other (e.g. measurably treating the requests of admins in the "in-group" differently than the "out-group"), and having no definition of what it means to be a "member of the community". I'm still a bit dismayed that there seems to be no set of guarantees of due process offered to non-member network users, but I guess this is a start. I've thought about commenting on their Github repo but I'm afraid of the retaliation as the staff seem like an extremely passionate bunch.
And perhaps this is just an argument for a truly federated system, like Matrix. Rather than submitting to an operator, run your own infrastructure and federate with everyone else.
