[danmg]

Small ircds that you would run for a single team don't split because it's a single server.

Large networks can have the servers go up and down, and it's still not a big deal because of redundancy. DNS round-robin entries mean you don't even have to know the other servers on the network.

In 2018 netsplits caused by down links are fairly rare. If you wait six months you might see one.

[vertex-four]

And if you run a small single-point ircd, at some point, the server or it’s internet connection will fail, and you’re in the same position as when Slack fails.

There’s nothing that gets around technical failure. Either you have a single server that’s going to die at some point due to sheer entropy, or you have a somewhat complex distributed system with the tradeoffs you desire that might fail anyway.

[danmg]

The downtime would be for a network connection failure and not because your 'fearless' NoSQL container didn't work as expected. If a transient networking problem like this is a big deal for you, you can easily add either more nodes or move the node to a place with more reliable networking.

[vertex-four]

Or because the IRCd written in 90s-style C++ by some people who honestly don’t know what they’re doing segfaulted, or because you accidentally K-lined 0.0.0.0/32, or because you accidentally filled up the disk with logs because the server’s maintainer was fired and nobody remembers how the system works, or the latest system update borked something, or a failure to update the system allowed someone to attack your network, or the really hacky mechanism you use to enable auth against Active Directory broke or allowed a disabled user to log in, or...

There’s a lot more that can go wrong than that a database falls over. In my experience, IRC servers fall over all the time - it’s just that nobody really cares because their clients just connect to the next server in the list and people resume their conversations a minute later after figuring out what messages actually reached their destination.

Paying IRCCloud to manage an IRC server for you is a reasonable option, but I wouldn’t do it because I think it’s going to be more available, but because I like IRC and believe it provides the functionality I need.

[danmg]

> Or because the IRCd written in 90s-style C++ by some people who honestly don’t know what they’re doing segfaulted,

Don't use a 20 year old ircd then. Use something like ratbox or InspIRCd.

> or because you accidentally K-lined 0.0.0.0/32 or because you accidentally filled up the disk with logs because the server’s maintainer was fired and nobody remembers how the system works, or the latest system update borked something

Don't let 14 year olds run your server.