I think part of the difficulty here is that there's two separate rebuildings going on: There's the various communities that used Freenode as their IRC location—

I think part of the difficulty here is that there's two separate rebuildings going on: There's the various communities that used Freenode as their IRC location—which I would say are analogous to the book club—and there's the staff of Freenode itself, who are (by and large) migrating together to found Libera.chat. That definitely does not fit, because aside from the raw infrastructure, they're not relying on anyone else's support for this—they're not in someone else's café, they're the café staff. So just to continue extending the analogy chain, it's closer to there being a café where lots of book clubs hang out, with a hands-off owner or some kind of employee cooperative actually owning the business itself, but through legal shenanigans, someone else gains control of the café business, and wants to drastically change how it's run. The staff all walk out and work on starting a new café down the street, and several of the book clubs follow because they like the atmosphere.