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My pleasure. I am sure others could add a great deal more. There is a very long history and there are many pieces of history I am leaving out. A big part I left out is the individual server rate limits vs. network link rate limits and network topology and that is both a technical and logistical issue.

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One positive thing I'd add - as a user - under logistics is high availability. Life is messy, servers go down planned or unplanned for whatever reasons - IRC networks are in a sense truly 'federated' in that the client will get a new server on reconnect attempts much like webservers behind a load balancer. You never have to worry about your 'home instance' being unavailable, as they're all your home instance. (I speak about the public networks like Libera or OFTC)

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