Wasn't IRC always federated? There were different networks, but each network was a federation of independent servers.owmed by independent operators as far as I understand...
replyI don't believe so, not in the strictness sense.
reply> A federated network is a system where independent networks, servers, or organizations agree to follow common standards so they can talk to each other without giving up control to a single central company.
In traditional IRC networks, you end up forming a spanning tree of servers that belong to a common name, "the network". However control remains in the hands of the operators of that network.
The "control" was basically permission to connect (and thus share messages/users/etc) between multiple servers. So I see your point, you couldn't just randomly connect your server to someone else's server in quite the same way email worked, but at the same time the servers could be easily owned by different people running different software.
replybut you could change networks, you could run your own.
replyProtocol was documented but each server is a silo.
reply> the only thing I took from Discord at all (it's UI is generally awful yes, I agree!) is the support for multiple servers.
replyTo be sure, Discord "servers" are not servers in the sense the word is used in virtually every other context. They are more like group chats that share a hosting location. If anything the hard part for Discord is making them seem disparate enough that someone might rent their "own server".