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Oh it was immediately clear that your original comment was right in the first half. The irssi example isn't intended to rebut that. I was rebutting the second h

Oh it was immediately clear that your original comment was right in the first half. The irssi example isn't intended to rebut that. I was rebutting the second half: that it was obvious. As someone who has thought about IRC for a couple of hours over the course of a decade, it's not obvious. The .irssi example is merely me trying to debug why I might have had that impression. (It's also not clear to me why people in this thread are getting so pedantic about the distinction between server and service. I'm just here to exercise my pet peeve: nothing about computers is obvious.)

saurik 3y ago
OK, so my argument here is that users aren't using IRC in a bubble: they are connecting to IRC to talk to a bunch of other people; and, because servers mattered SO MUCH, and the clients you were using--including irssi--are so consistent with the terminology split between "server" and "network", they wouldn't have continued to use the wrong term for very long because someone else would have corrected them or they quickly would have needed to do something more complicated with their client and discovered the difference in either the documentation or the output from basic commands like /connect. Like, what server you were on was a near daily discussion among just about everyone on EFNet in particular, because EFNet was notorious for experiencing netsplits as it was simultaneously enormous and almost entirely unprotected: some networks (I think the big one being Undernet? it's been 25 years so I am likely remembering this poorly... I did a quick search for this and maybe I'm thinking of DALNet?) had come up with this idea of "services" like chanserv and nickserv that would help you register your stuff so it couldn't get stolen; but, on EFNet, every channel worth a damn had to be protected by redundant bots spread across the topology. https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791 https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791 https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167 https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167 FWIW, the reason why the Discord usage of "server" kind of pisses me off is because it actively makes it more difficult for users to come to the correct understanding of terms in general parlance: it trains them to use a term "server" in a way that actively makes them understand the term less because exactly one popular service--Discord--has decided to misuse the term... and they do so with the excuse "we just wanted to be analogous to IRC"; but, somehow, they even got that wrong, and so the whole thing comes across as so incompetent as to be negligent and (thereby) passively malicious :/. (I also probably am a bit more frustrated about Discord than a random commentator because, in addition to having been screwed during the username upgrade last month, a long time ago I was working on a similar service and even had a similar architecture--hell: I was even building it using Erlang; I don't think it was in Elixir, but I was an early user of that also and it might have been... I had two projects: one in Erlang and one in Elixir, and I don't even remember what the other one was--but then Slack came out and I thought I would never be able to compete against them as they had epic UI people... but then Slack chose a target market I found limited and after a couple years of feeling they would have to enter this space, Discord suddenly became popular and I was all like "damn it why the hell didn't I just assume Slack would be stupid?!".)
- akkartik 3y ago
  Ok that makes sense once you bring up netsplits. (Are they still as prevalent as they used to be? Or did the network grow more robust over time? Or is just the reduced usage of IRC that makes them matter less?)

saurik 3y ago

OK, so my argument here is that users aren't using IRC in a bubble: they are connecting to IRC to talk to a bunch of other people; and, because servers mattered SO MUCH, and the clients you were using--including irssi--are so consistent with the terminology split between "server" and "network", they wouldn't have continued to use the wrong term for very long because someone else would have corrected them or they quickly would have needed to do something more complicated with their client and discovered the difference in either the documentation or the output from basic commands like /connect. Like, what server you were on was a near daily discussion among just about everyone on EFNet in particular, because EFNet was notorious for experiencing netsplits as it was simultaneously enormous and almost entirely unprotected: some networks (I think the big one being Undernet? it's been 25 years so I am likely remembering this poorly... I did a quick search for this and maybe I'm thinking of DALNet?) had come up with this idea of "services" like chanserv and nickserv that would help you register your stuff so it couldn't get stolen; but, on EFNet, every channel worth a damn had to be protected by redundant bots spread across the topology. https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791 https://m.slashdot.org/story/13791 https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167 https://m.slashdot.org/story/19167 FWIW, the reason why the Discord usage of "server" kind of pisses me off is because it actively makes it more difficult for users to come to the correct understanding of terms in general parlance: it trains them to use a term "server" in a way that actively makes them understand the term less because exactly one popular service--Discord--has decided to misuse the term... and they do so with the excuse "we just wanted to be analogous to IRC"; but, somehow, they even got that wrong, and so the whole thing comes across as so incompetent as to be negligent and (thereby) passively malicious :/. (I also probably am a bit more frustrated about Discord than a random commentator because, in addition to having been screwed during the username upgrade last month, a long time ago I was working on a similar service and even had a similar architecture--hell: I was even building it using Erlang; I don't think it was in Elixir, but I was an early user of that also and it might have been... I had two projects: one in Erlang and one in Elixir, and I don't even remember what the other one was--but then Slack came out and I thought I would never be able to compete against them as they had epic UI people... but then Slack chose a target market I found limited and after a couple years of feeling they would have to enter this space, Discord suddenly became popular and I was all like "damn it why the hell didn't I just assume Slack would be stupid?!".)

akkartik 3y ago
Ok that makes sense once you bring up netsplits. (Are they still as prevalent as they used to be? Or did the network grow more robust over time? Or is just the reduced usage of IRC that makes them matter less?)