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by TeMPOraL 3494 days ago
I purposefully didn't mention IRC in a parallel comment because I don't see how it is federated. You always connect to a particular server and stay within its bounds; you don't get the shared space handled by multiple servers that are abstracted away. Or simpler, you say "I'm hanging out on channel #x on freenode", or "on QuakeNet", not "on IRC".

As for the rest of your comment, I agree.
2 comments
usrusr 3493 days ago
The isolation level you speak of is between networks, not between servers. This distinction might seem a little arbitrary since no centralized system of relevance is running on a single server either, but the key difference is still there: in the larger irc networks, the different nodes that form it are run by different organizations.

Splits are a possibility in any federated system and in systems with nonhierarchical, unique naming, any merge requires some amount of namespace violence proportional to the duration of the split.

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spc476 3494 days ago
I seem to recall that when IRC first started, there was only one "network" and that it was a Big Thing when a second IRC network started up.
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