I meant I had assumed the libera.chat staff still had admin status in freenode, and had been behind this move, but apparently they all got removed a week ago.
No, that was done by the #rsync admin, because they opted to do a "hard" move. What the freenode guys are doing is using this fact as an excuse to subsequently and indiscriminately hijack every channel which mentions Libera in the topic, in any way.
I myself did a hard move of my project's channels to OFTC (#asahi and friends) - I didn't kick everyone out but I did leave the channels +m and with an explanatory topic, as I figured going cold turkey would be the best option, especially given the relative youth of my project (it started in JJanuary). We were spared the takeovers because we moved to OFTC, so our topic didn't include the "Libera" trigger word.
In retrospect, this hard move was evidently the right choice, given subsequent actions by freenode admins, and after this latest action I decided that even the moderated state was too unstable, and did what #rsync did (kick everyone out), except I changed the topic to something that doesn't mention any moves and locked it with +l 1. I hope perhaps this will allow the channels to fly under the radar of freenode staff, so they don't take them over - especially since they've been redirecting project channels to identically-named topic channels with no regard to who owns them, and ##asahi is some older channel owned by an unrelated person.
It is ridiculous for freenode to claim authority to override project owners' choice to migrate to another network. The entire point of (old) freenode, and what set it apart from other networks, is that its official namespace was verified. That means it is officially controlled by a given project's leaders. For example, our project owns #asahi and the #asahi-* namespace on freenode. That also means that we project leaders should be free to choose not to use freenode for our project, and direct users elsewhere.
