maybe the password has a special character that Lemmy can’t handle. In any case, it’s one that @tom might need to look at.

This will very quickly go the same way as IRC. The spirit of Eris lives again on ActivityPub.

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

IRC is a plaintext chat system which was originally decentralised and federated. Technically decentralisation and federation is still perfectly possible in the IRC protocol. Nobody does it so freely any more, ever since the Eris Free Net decided to go its own way because it made sense to do so.

It achieved this by blocking any IRC server that is connected to the Eris server.

In this case it wasn’t political - it was due to spam, flamewars, and organisational problems (what I just called ‘the spirit of Eris’). If you throw politics in there (or rather the fact that these days moderators are accustomed to seeing political views they already agree with on the Internet), I think it just will accelerate things towards defederation, or federation with only people we seem to agree with (read: easy to moderate).