A large proportion of Freenode's users migrated to Libera.Chat, when Freenode's owner changed.
In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated a new company called Freenode Limited and transferred ownership to technology entrepreneur Andrew Lee.[5][3][6] In February 2021, Dahlskjaer added the logo of Shells, a company co-founded by Lee, to the Freenode website.[3] Following criticism from staff, Dahlskjaer resigned from the leadership of Freenode,[6][3] and Freenode staff elected Tom Wesley as the new head of staff. Lee allegedly removed a blog post explaining the leadership changes and, on 11 May, appointed a new person to oversee the Freenode infrastructure.[3] Freenode staff members resigned en masse, and some published statements outlining their view of what happened and claiming that Lee had been applying legal pressure to Wesley.[3]
Lee denied these claims, and said that he had provided Freenode with millions of dollars and was entitled to Freenode's servers as the owner of Freenode Limited.[3][6] Lee also accused Wesley of harassing Dahlskjaer and of attempting a "hostile takeover."[3][7][6][8]
After resigning from Freenode, the former staff created Libera Chat on 19 May 2021.[2][3] They have described the network as a successor to Freenode, which they intend to focus around "free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours".[6] Many major projects like Bitcoin, FrOSCon, Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FreeBSD, the Free Software Foundation[9] and Wikimedia have since moved their channels from Freenode to Libera Chat and to other IRC networks.[10]
