"it’s an annoying thing to force everyone to move just to stick it to a guy who I still haven’t seen any evidence for me to believe was trying to do something other than retaining the power to prevent Freenode from falling into the wrong hands." I'm a complete outsider, so take this with a hill of salt, but the evidence seems to indicate that he (or people he's chosen) have been taking over channels linking to libera, and banning people for redirecting. Info from twitter/shadowcat_mst
(context: Freenode drama)
Yeah, rasengan's more recent actions (which happened after when I made that post) definitely don't put him in a good light.
(recap: he's taken over every channel mentioning Libera, and banned all authed users including voices in those channels. I think this is somewhat understandable for channels that are completely shut down and nothing but Libera redirects, but doing this for channels open on both to see how the drama settles was massively going too far.)
rasengan is clearly incompetent at running Freenode, so I'm glad I've already switched to Libera and recommend everyone else do too.
That said, I don't think my analysis was wrong. It still seems to me like rasengan never wanted to run Freenode in the first place, and only ended up in this position because Freenode staff picked a fight over the DNS issue.
This Gist from prawnsalad matches my understanding of the issue:
https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c1646791c61953
What was very alarming, however, was the attitude from the freenode head of staff and how this was being handled. The ego, willing to have freenode destroyed because he wanted to "win" an argument over DNS access that was a silly miscommunication to start with.
I thought tomaw was the Freenode head of staff at this point, but the context seems to imply that it's some unnamed other person. I'm hedging by saying "Freenode staff" at the moment.
All that said, even if rasengan hadn't fucked up running the remains of Freenode, I'd still be on Libera right now, because I still think the old Freenode staff, as much as I think they overreacted here, would be better at running an IRC network than sorts of people rasengan can scrape together to replace them.
All that said, I still think this is the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy Scott talks about a lot: if you yell "this community is full of racists" loudly enough, the community's non-racists will leave, racists will hear about it and join, and then you will seem to have retroactively been proven right even if your original yell was a complete lie. I think that's pretty similar to what's going on here. People yelled that rasengan was an asshole, everyone who was good at running Freenode left, and rasengan who never wanted to run Freenode and didn't have the skills to do so fucked it up.
