> So who did own the infrastructure, and where did they stand on all of this?

All hardware was owned by various organizations acting as "sponsors". But at this point most of it might have been replaced by servers owned by Lee.

One of the sponsors, whose server hosted freenode's email server, pulled out shortly after the volunteers left.

The reason they're going to Libera.chat is because the former Freenode staff set it up—moving to another existing IRC network would mean, essentially, abandoning your own house and coming to someone else's and asking to be allowed to set up in there, while what they're doing is trying to build their own new house.

> while what they're doing is trying to build their own new house.

I'd say they're just trying to rebuild their old house. Once all the dust settles in a few months, I expect Libera Chat will be pretty much the same as FreeNode was, with all the same channels being run by the same people, with the exception that I'll have to register a new account with NickServ.

That latter aspect, registering your account with NickServ does seem to sucks somewhat.. Apparently there have been some bots active which have registered a whole bunch of nicks which previously existed on FreeNode. #libera is full of people (including myself) who are asking if staff can do something about this nick squatting. Understandably that will take time and I've simply registered another nick, but man, you get attached to a 15+ year old nick you've been using on OFTC, FreeNode and a bunch of other ye olde IRC networks..

> I'd say they're just trying to rebuild their old house.

I guess that gets into a semantic (or even existential) question: if it's in a different place, and the original house is still there (if damaged and usurped), even if it is built identically, is it the old house, or a new one?

But yes, that's also a perfectly reasonable way of analogizing Libera.chat, as I understand the situation.

A house is the wrong analogy. We're talking about communities of people here, not a building. (This is another good example of why analogies rarely clarify, and usually just end up in a discussion over how accurate the analogy is.)

A better analogy would be: Let's say you've been going to the same book club for 15 years now, but the cafe you've been meeting at has closed. So the group picks a new cafe and the book club continues. Not much has really changed; it's still the same people, meeting up regularly for the same person.

I think part of the difficulty here is that there's two separate rebuildings going on: There's the various communities that used Freenode as their IRC location—which I would say are analogous to the book club—and there's the staff of Freenode itself, who are (by and large) migrating together to found Libera.chat. That definitely does not fit, because aside from the raw infrastructure, they're not relying on anyone else's support for this—they're not in someone else's café, they're the café staff.

So just to continue extending the analogy chain, it's closer to there being a café where lots of book clubs hang out, with a hands-off owner or some kind of employee cooperative actually owning the business itself, but through legal shenanigans, someone else gains control of the café business, and wants to drastically change how it's run. The staff all walk out and work on starting a new café down the street, and several of the book clubs follow because they like the atmosphere.

Freenode's largest competitor is likely OFTC, not IRCNet. IRCNet is a general purpose IRC network, Freenode is more open source and surrounding topics, as is OFTC. OFTC however is more strictly on-topic (off topic channels must be +s, which means they don't show up in channel listings).