I mean they haven’t infiltrated the private phpbb forum me and my friends have been running since 2008, for the simple reason that they aren’t invited.

Mark Zuckerberg smiled to himself. Nobody knew that he was DarkWolf47.

I have no problem going back down to pre-2019 levels where it’s just a few hundred of us, chatting and sharing #caturday pictures.

IRC did do that on a few cases, where one federated IRC network had irreconciliable differences with another and you had a split, with a new IRC network forming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

EFnet or Eris-Free network is a major Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with more than 35,000 users.[1] It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.

In July 1996, disagreement on policy caused EFnet to break in two: the slightly larger European half (including Australia and Japan) formed IRCnet, while the American servers continued as EFnet. This was known as The Great Split.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undernet

Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny Mitchell, Donald Lambert, and Laurent Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRCd software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth-consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet.[4] The Undernet IRC daemon became known as "ircu". Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.