IRC has a concept of "ops" or operator privileges, which are per-channel moderation priveleges. The exact privileges depend on the IRC software running, but it usually means that you can change the advertised topic message, mute / un-mute users, and kick users out of the channel.

Hijack means removing those privileges from someone else and assigning them to yourself.

> What exactly does "hijack" mean though? I don't speak IRC so it's not clear what they're actually doing to the channels.

In Reddit terms, imagine the Reddit administrators coming to your subreddit, deleting the moderators and then installing their own.

Administrators always had this power. Sometimes, this power was used out of necessity. But given how much this power was used in FreeNode in the past week, a lot of the community has lost faith in the administrators.

But yeah, if you control the server (the nature of being an administrator), you can do these things rather easily.

> Administrators always had this power. Sometimes, this power was used out of necessity. But given how much this power was used in FreeNode in the past week, a lot of the community has lost faith in the administrators.

To be slightly more exact, the admins suing those powers properly for the past couple decades have been pushed out by the new guy, and said new guy has already abused those powers so much in a single week that nobody will ever have any faith in him

I guess I always assumed that IRC was decentralized; one server could drop, or go rogue, with no ill effects.

But that's probably an anachronism, given the age of IRC.

It's not one server, he's obtained control over the whole Freenode network.

It's decentralized to a degree. Running an IRC server isn't much more complex than running a HTTP server so just about anyone can do that. Of course when a server (or in this case a whole network of servers) gets hijacked all the people using that server need to find a new server, or decide to be okay with the new government.

Looks like they’re replacing the channel mods with Lee’s people the moment Libera is mentioned.

Removed all existing ops (channel admins), set the channel to invite-only, set the channel to ops-only. Basically removed all the existing mod team then made the channel mod-only, which kicked all users.

For people actually moving, the last thing could be quite helpful. One of the challenges for a lot of communities will be making sure everyone knows the move is happening. If the new guys are kicking everyone off the old channels and making it impossible to join, that will prompt everyone lurking on there (and somehow unaware of all the drama going on) to seek the new channel.

Wow, that seems incredibly hostile to everyone involved.

It is incredibly hostile.

Imagine that someone takes over your domain name, puts up their own website that says it's now the support venue for YourThing, but locks you out of it.

Now you've moved to another place but have no way to leave a signpost or redirect. And anyone who doesn't get that memo through some other means, will land in a confusingly-named place that looks official but is precisely the opposite.

Basically removing the current ops (controlling users) and replacing them with their own people (who will stifle conversations the new top dog doesn't like).

I'll not go into more detail as existing threads here cover it far better than I could.