alt Hacker NewsI feel like I have different memories about the instability of Internet services in the past than some people do.
Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.
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Yeah, netsplits were really common; nickserv and/or chanserv not working for long periods making popular channels a hell without ops.
I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.
I never seen long-running problems in big server-federations like DALNet. Our local "big" IRC servers were generally down for 10 minutes at most. They were not empty either.
Simple services recover faster. Federated infrastructure is much more resilient. We had slower computers, more considerate coders, and simpler software; so everything was snappier, even with 56K modems.
For example, navigate to https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/. No scripts, pure HTML. running on a single server. Served instantly.
This is possible. We, as in the world, just ignore it for shinier stones.
Now, a small VPS in an AWS server lapses for 5 seconds, and half of internet is toast. Centralization for the PWN!
If there was a netsplit you just bunched together on one server. It was more decentralized and a bit more reliant in a way.
The difference was it wasn't one global server for everyone. I think that's why the past feels like it was more stable.
Now, aws or cloudflare gets a hickup and half the internet is nuked.
The old internet was far more federated so doing something else meant to me "Welp, anandtech is down, let's go to pcper, digg, tomshardware, slashdot, etc"
Sure stuff would go down, but it would be just that small community rather than most of chat for the internet.