[5][3][6] In February 2021, Dahlskjaer added the logo of Shells, a company co-founded by Lee, to the Freenode website.

Lee allegedly removed a blog post explaining the leadership changes and, on 11 May, appointed a new person to oversee the Freenode infrastructure.

[3] Freenode staff members resigned en masse, and some published statements outlining their view of what happened and claiming that Lee had been applying legal pressure to Wesley.

[2][3] They have described the network as a successor to Freenode, which they intend to focus around "free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours".

[6] Many major projects like Bitcoin, FrOSCon, Fedora, Ubuntu, Gentoo, FreeBSD, the Free Software Foundation[9] and Wikimedia have since moved their channels from Freenode to Libera Chat and to other IRC networks.