this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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You are wrong, IRC specification says servers connect to each other to form IRC network, and a channel can be a distributed channel, which is known to all servers on the IRC network
See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1459#section-1.3
There are a few major differences for IRC.
First there isn't any sort of message history or sequencing beyond what is implemented on a server. For IM if your phone is off and you turn it back on all the messages you miss are sent to you. This requires each message to be stored in a database or semi long term storage, keeping track of if everyone in the group had confirmed receiving it. IRC doesn't track any of that, if you're not connected you miss out which makes IRC have a lot less overhead.
The other difference is that server to server was a concept for building a network of location based servers for a single network. Its not federation, but handling user overhead. You don't have random individuals running their own servers on subpar hardware causing undue stress on the network. You dont have thousands of instances with huge degrees of latency difference to deal with. Server to server was made so you could connect to
east.myirc.co
andwest.myirc.co
.Damn, knew I should have taken the 10 seconds this would have required to google. Thanks for the info!