[chrisfosterelli]

A whole other part of this argument that could be made is about the inherent assumption that a ping timeout is caused by an event that only affects one machine.

[kstrauser]

For sure. Having lived on IRC for a while many years ago, I assure any bystanders that this is assuredly not always the case.

[paradox460]

Imagine them trying to sue every person on one side of a netsplit

[eek2121]

...and back in my day (yeah I am becoming an old fart), it was dead simple to cause a netsplit on most networks.

[paradox460]

I'll admit to sending a couple of the messages that made Linksys routers restart. I also set up automatic k-lines on Snoonet for these very strings, years ago

[oooyay]

Ergo isn't a federated server, it's meant to scale vertically

[KK7NIL]

The internet is a "federated" network though, so their point still applies.

[oooyay]

No, Ergo doesn't have netsplits because there isn't anything to split with. The point does not apply.

[chrisfosterelli]

There are events that may affect more than one machine which are not netsplits.

e.g. an ISP with common users experiences an outage, an IRC client with common users has a bug, common users within the same time zone have automated system updates run at the same time, the IRC server experiences an upstream network disruption affecting only some routes, a regional power outage occurs, a hosted bouncer service with common users has an outage, etc, etc, etc...