Alleged crown prince of the Joseon Empire. Which hasn't existed for ~110 years, and is based on an ennoblement by one of several contenders for the current head of the former imperial family, so it's an even weaker claim than most pretenders of former monarchies have.
First off, I am not affiliated with freenode or libera. I am just an unrelated guy who happens to use IRC. I am not offering any money to anyone for any IRC related things.
Secondly, you claimed that it is not possible to buy communities or goodwill. This does not match what I have witnessed in life. Communities get bought all the time, e.g. Facebook buying Instagram. Goodwill also gets bought all the time, often by making a giant donation and then running a giant PR campaign to let everyone know about the good deed. Distributed organic communities like freenode aren't immune to this, as I showed by pointing out that I, a long time freenode user, would be willing to accept payment.
This is false. Communities get sold successfully all the time (thing of tech giants buying up unicorns or whatever). But doing that with a (predominantly) FOSS community was definitely doomed from the start.
It's less that the communities were FOSS than that it was built on a widely-implemented, stable, open protocol. Moving to a new server means everyone takes 30 seconds to add the new server and join the new channel, but keeps using the same client. Maybe you have to change a line of config on some bots and restart them. Done.
We see fewer of those developed now precisely because it forces providers (free or paid) to behave well or else be easily abandoned. Facebook, Twitter, Google, et c., do not want that, for obvious reasons.
