I never played on it. I remember that back in the olden days most free op servers were cracked. Someone posed as me and got executive on EXPLODINGFreedom. I had never joined the server before and the one time I did no one believed someone else was pretending to be me. Good times.
I was responsible for reorganizing EXPLODINGFreedom's development and overall model in mid-2020 to something more sustainable. The TotalFreedomMod fork it ran is probably one of the oldest and most extensive modifications of the original plugin to date and has been renamed several times now. A lot of ideas implemented in that fork were years ahead of their time, despite the fact that the plugin was using a much older version of the TotalFreedomMod as its base (which was either TFM 4.2 or TFM 4.3, can't remember which). I eventually plan to open source it, with a disclaimer stating that the code is pure spaghetti and should not be used in a production environment.
A bit of a fun fact is that a few years ago, a couple of high ranking staff members from EF met up in real life. We roamed the streets of New York City until sunset and stayed up late into the night playing the best game of Monopoly in a hotel room. Alco lost his voice from laughing so hard and I actually fell out of my chair laughing. One day, I'll tell you all about how that game went.
It's dead. It was eventually rebranded from a free-op since that gamemode was unsustainable and caused too many problems. It would become a regular creative server, and in its current state, it is a private creative server under a different identity and brand.
And to answer @videogamesm12, its original plugin was, as far as I know, TFM 4.2 and when 4.3 was available, elements from it were merged into it.