The evidence suggests that is not the case. Freenode has already lost almost half of its users in the last month and the projections suggest that Libera Chat will overtake freenode in user count in just over a week and that freenode will drop to the third largest network by user count in about a month. These projections have been pretty optimistic for freenode over the last few weeks too, the reality of the situation has shown freenode lose users faster than the projections forecast.
Yeah I heard that. It's GPLv2 licensed so he's free to use it (if he can even migrate his services database without corrupting it) but his lackies have been informed that they will be banned on sight if they try to ask for support.
The former has PRIVMSG (message) statistics which show that Libera Chat is considerably more active than freenode despite having less total users (for now, the crossover point is predicted to be the 26th and it's been moving closer and closer for days).
Within IRC culture networks exist to serve the projects and users not the other way around. Failing to understand this is why leenode is losing users in the first place.
As the maintainer of one of the more popular IRC server implementations I know a giant chunk of the Libera Chat (formerly freenode) staff pretty well and whilst we may disagree frequently on technical choices they're decent people who were appointed based on technical merit. They pretty much didn't have any say in rasengan seizing control of freenode as Christel sold out the project and lied to the other staff about what what had happened for several years. After Christel was ousted they reorganised and elected teams internally and after the network switch have developed a governance system which requires strong consensus to avoid this ever happening again.[1]
OFTC and Libera Chat aren't as different as you seem to think. There is also a lot of cooperation between the two projects which has been going on for years. Solanum is being developed as a joint project and some staff members are involved with both networks.
So basically this is Hacker News but where rasengan can ban the people who are not being sufficiently idolatrous towards him?
It's a crying shame how one of the oldest surviving FLOSS community resources has been turned into a personal playground for an ancap blowhard who can't accept that no matter the amount of money he throws around it won't get people to like him.
A week ago freenode had 78644 users according to netsplit. Bragging about tanking your user count by 10k in a week (and its still dropping, it's at 66715 now) is a weird flex.
Not to defend rasengan (my opinion of him and his freenode tyrancy is severely negative and I fully support the actions of the ex-freenode now-Libera.Chat team) but as someone who previously had access to the Snoonet servers and as the developer of the open source IRC server software that Snoonet uses (InspIRCd) I can confirm that there was no message intercept ability on Snoonet as of a few months ago when I resigned. No SSH access was given to rasengan on any servers all of which were locked down pretty heavily to a small subset of staff including formerly myself.
I think it is very unlikely that any surveillance capacity has been added since I resigned given that the remaining volunteers (who were not appointed by rasengan and many of whom predate rasengan's ownership of the network) are decent people who would not tolerate that. InspIRCd also makes it very hard to surveil users without them knowing (and I've made it harder since becoming the lead maintainer) as it sends notices to all users on connect if rawio debug mode is enabled and all loaded modules are listed in `/MODULES` which is explicitly exempt from being disabled in the config. Being open source it's technically possible to disable these checks by editing the source but from what I have seen rasengan is not a very good programmer[1] so he would probably not be able to do that without being caught.