Lots of correct and insightful information here, but I'd like to pick out one specific aspect here. > [...] clients could be configured to quickly attach to an

Lots of correct and insightful information here, but I'd like to pick out one specific aspect here. > [...] clients could be configured to quickly attach to another server in another region and that is just DNS management. This could have been further improved by amending or replacing the IRC RFC's to allow SRV records. This may have been done by now for all I know. To set the stage: Larger IRC networks balance their global servers. A DNS A query for irc.example.com will yield a list of geographically local servers, possibly shuffled on each query as well. I know of at least one IRC network that refuses to send even the list of all geographically local servers, only sending a subset, as a measure to avoid trivial DDoS attacks if people don't go around collecting the DNS records ahead of time. I'm told that this actually works because the thread actors are not the sophisticated kind. Incidentally, I have also noted that some networks will shuffle the order of A records for each query because the clients cannot be trusted to select a random DNS response. Considering something this trivial already doesn't work, I dread to imagine how much a DNS SRV implementation would go wrong, considering it needs both sorting and a weighted random sampling[1] to really work. [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2782 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2782 page 3 et seq.