The sharp drop in Freenode usage in mid June was Freenode's own doing. The sharp drop occurred due to Freenode wiping out its database and starting over from sc

The sharp drop in Freenode usage in mid June was Freenode's own doing. The sharp drop occurred due to Freenode wiping out its database and starting over from scratch again on 15 Jun 2021. See https://old.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/o01tmv https://old.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/o01tmv for more details. What that really meant was that decades old nicks and channels were completely wiped out! For example, my own 15 year nick was gone. A 150 member channel I used to operate for 14 years was also gone. All the nicks and other channels I was familiar with were also gone. I did not bother registeringing my nick and channel there again! It was not worth it. I had moved on to Libera Chat already and there was nothing left on Freenode to care about it anymore. If Freenode had not wiped out its database on 15 Jun 2021, many nicks and channels would still be present on Freenode even if they were dormant and we would have still been seeing a gradual decline in its usage instead of a sharp drop like we see in the graphs here.