Liberated

The Liberated are a group of ex-Borg active in the Alpha Quadrant.

Origins
In 2368, Enterprise-D encountered a crashed Borg scout ship and recovered a single drone. The drone, later named Hugh was completely cut off from the Borg Collective, and began to develop a sense of individuality. Although the Enterprise crew originally intended to infect Hugh with a virus designed to destroy the Collective, Captain Picard decided that it was wrong to use an individual as a Trojan horse. Instead, he believed that Hugh's newfound individuality would spread through the Collective as a different, yet effective, sort of virus. 

After Hugh was recovered by the Borg, his individuality spread quickly through his cube, causing the Collective to cut the entire drone population of the cube off from the rest of the Collective. The cube, being populated with incubated drones who had no prior experience as individuals, was lost and confused, and easily manipulated when they encountered Lore soon after. The ersatz android convinced a large number of drones to follow him in a campaign against the Federation, luring them with the promise of becoming fully cybernetic. Hugh, along with a small number of drones, set up a resistance movement, and slowly began to undermine Lore's power. With the assistance of Enterprise, Hugh and his drones managed to defeat Lore's forces. 

Forming a Society
After the defeat of Lore, Enterprise left the former drones with various supplies to help them recover, including a sociological database. They chose a rather appropriate name for themselves - the Liberated - and began to build a new society. Instead of directly adopting the culture any of the races in the database, the Liberated began to create new traditions for themselves, including sharing communal meals and a Speaking of the Names, a gathering where the Liberated explained the names they chose for themselves.

The Liberated still had access to Borg technology salvaged from their cube, as well as at least one ship, the Liberator. They began to explore the area around their new homeworld, and made contact with several species. Most of their neighbors were frightened at first, and the Liberated decided to begin removing those implants they could in order to lessen their connections with the Borg. In time, the Liberated managed to begin trading with some of their neighbors, while abiding by other races' requests that the Liberated not contact them again. 

New Problems, New Opportunities
However, their peace was short-lived. Less than four years after the Liberated were freed, they came under attack from two fronts. In 2373, the Borg invaded a realm known as fluidic space and attempted to assimilate Species 8472. Species 8472 proved resistant to assimilation, and began an invasion of Borg space. Their efforts were not limited to the Borg's home territory, the Delta Quadrant, but included all outlying Borg areas, including the Liberated's territory. Since Species 8472's biological attacks quickly spread through the highly centralized Borg systems, the Liberated retrofitted their remaining vessels with decentralized technology, including individual computer cores and warp drives.

Unfortunately, this attracted the attention of the Borg. In addition to the new possibilities of the decentralized systems in fighting Species 8472, the Borg began efforts to re-assimilate their lost drones to bolster their devastated numbers. Even after Voyager managed to force Species 8472 back into fluidic space, the Borg did not cease their attempts to recapture the Liberated. It was only due to their individual ingenuity with modifying Borg technology (and, presumably, technology introduced by Lore) that the Liberated avoided re-assimilation. ,

The fight against the Borg was made easier in early 2376, when Voyager freed all of the drones who possessed the ability to enter Unimatrix Zero. The Zeros, as the Liberated called them, were able to weaken and distract the Borg from their fight against the Liberated. Some Zeros, including former Enterprise crewman Rebekah Grabowski, were close enough to the Liberated to bring more people and ships to the fight.