The problem is, many of them didn’t realize this was a problem until recently.
That said, plenty of exciting stuff is happening outside of the walled garden, as long as you know how to find it.
We had a discussion with coworkers and somebody mentioned irc. Explaining to younger colleagues what it was and that it was not a product of a company, but operators had servers that formed a network, and it was more like infrastructure. Felt weird.
Perhaps it wasn’t the federated nature of irc that was surprising but the fact that it was irc?
IRC networks usually have multiple servers connected together (historically, often run by a bunch of different people) and I didn't think people self-hosting minecraft servers usually did that?
And where do I get the RFC for the protocol so that I can write my own compatible implementation?
IRC isn't a product. It's a standardized protocol sufficiently simple to implement in a day or two.