> everyone left for Libera and the community wasn't split at all
Sadly Libera.Chat is only at about half the size [0] that Freenode was. Sure, a lot of those lost will not have been active participants anymore (just keeping their bouncer/client running) but all of them?
Yeah I have a strong feeling a lot of those are just bouncers that are running on some old VPS, totally forgotten.
I also think this would have triggered people to think "do I actually still want to be on IRC"? Rather than just idling for years.
However I didn't know it was still only half the size. That is much worse than I expected.
I know some of them have moved to other networks, for example the alpine linux team went to OFTC. So part of it is explained by that. Still a split of the community but OFTC is a very similar type of community.
Sadly Libera.Chat is only at about half the size [0] that Freenode was. Sure, a lot of those lost will not have been active participants anymore (just keeping their bouncer/client running) but all of them?
[0] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php