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riceart | 2 years ago
What? What do you think the term “relay” in IRC means? The jargon term netsplit used even for newer federated networks (even used in these comments elsewhere) comes from IRC. There is literally an entire network named after a defederation event.
Now we sort of take for granted that IRC is basically a closed federated system - but the original design of the network was one dominant set of relays - EFnet is a direct descendant of this network after all - if anything it’s just a specific example of politics and network evolution. There are technical reasons as well - but at the time of the early splits of the 90s (EFnet, Undernet) it was not primarily technical problems.
Anyone involved in a fediverse I think would do well to learn some lessons from IRC even if their system is technically superior.
> but so is email
As a federated system barely - go try to stand up an email server on your home network or VPS and see how well that works. It’s run by a cabal of large providers.
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