My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually.
Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.
We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc.
I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was.
Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well.
> We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust.
This is a half-truth. Some people (in a community I'm in) had implicit trust in the team that did such a great job running freenode, though not everyone. I'd say you already had some trust (just like some IRC software, I guess); and we're glad we chose to follow to libera.chat in the end.
I sincerely applaud focusing on positivity instead of negativity. You all are not putting in your current efforts because of FreeNode. That's long in the past and completely irrelevant to current efforts. You're all doing it to enable the wonderful communities that are out there and thrive on this fertile ground.
> We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.
This really helped. You focused on "getting life back to normal" from the get-go, looking to move forward instead of looking back at the anger and despair. This really helped to make Libera the home it always was within a matter of weeks. Really well done and thank you.
For me this mature and positive mindset only increased my trust in the team, there was never any need to rebuild it because none was lost :)
I agree that history is in your favor (and so does everyone else who moved to Libera), which is why it was a bit odd to not see Freenode mentioned at all. It's nothing bad, it was just a bit "hmm, I wonder why they did that".
You may want to make it a 'clean cut', but that's not how it comes off as. When I read it (as well as everyone in our Libera channel who commented), it comes off as sounding so terrified of the clown prince that the word 'Freenode' can't even be mentioned, and the huge lacuna looks hilarious (especially the parts about growth).
Yeah this is what I thought also, but fuchs's answer makes a lot of sense, and I have seen how that approach to looking forward really worked. But you're right, I did get that feeling too from the blog post.
Perhaps just a line about wanting to look forward and not dwell on the past would have clarified it.
I'm completely uninitiated to this topic but I'll give it a shot from what I've read in this and the parent comment: It seems like there's some denial about the past/roots of Libera, in this blog post. The "acceptance" phase is yet to come.
My initial draft did include a sentence about freenode in the first paragraph, but after a short internal discussion we decided to remove that, so I rewrote that part. Rather easy and quick, actually.
Now on the why: Libera was a clear cut. Reasons for that are different per person affected, but include e.g. a lot of pain to see what has become of something we put years in, wanting to have a positive vibe / outlook and rather create than mourn et cetera. We always communicated and worked in that way, we also asked people who basically lifestreamed the decline of freenode, which looked a mixture of a bad trash tv novella and a dumpster fire, to please move it out of our main channel. The blog post basically just continues in that spirit.
We are aware of our history, and people interested in it still can find the whole mess floating around on the web. Tech articles, discussions on social media, blog posts of various projects and users etc. I think history is "in our favour" and there is no need to try and hide it. The blog post, however, is about our Birthday and focusses on Libera.Chat, and not on the past that freenode was.
Of course that makes the "from scratch" sound a bit wrong, but as some other user here already pointed out: it isn't that wrong. We built up everything from scratch, and that includes trust. We didn't know how many projects and communities would follow us and migrate over, especially not that early. We are of course very grateful that so many did, and for all the support we received during the very hard first weeks. But we could never be sure if it would go that well.
Hope that clears up that part a bit :)
Edit: removed a typo / half cut off sentence