For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would caus

For a little while it was an open federation of sort. The problem is that it had a single namespace of user and channel names, so misbehaving servers would cause chaos. Wikipedia has a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#EFnet