lilo, one of the Freenode admins and a regular on that channel flagged it as "abandoned" by renaming it to ##debian-devel. There were still around 150 users on that channel (as opposed to 315 on OFTC, the new official home); but according to his stats "about 16 lines of discussion per day, versus 103" joins - yeah, I guess you can call that mostly dead.

Apparently the "##" prefix of a channel means it's somewhat inofficial or abandoned... well, that is some FreeNodeish thing I wasn't aware of.

Note: apparently we can't change the topic of the new channel, and can't put up a message there about the move to OFTC... that sucks.

I didn't follow the rename, but parted. I still have some other FreeNode channels left (#debian.de is still more active on Freenode), and there is #selinux; but I guess in a few month I'll actually stop using FreeNode now. (The #selinux channel isn't really interesting for me; nothing Debian-specific happening in there, mostly Fedora or Gentoo users looking for assistance.)

P.S.: 'e's not dead. 'e's just restin'.