I always thought IRC was pretty decentralized, but I didn’t realize talk(1) was designed to work machine-to-machine. That means in theory that if you have a talk(1) binary on your machine, you could chat directly to anyone else with the same binary, even on a different platform. Since 4.3BSD! Anyway, I only realized this because of this recent bugfix thanks to Dan Cross.
A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
That’s what I meant for servers, the idea that there’s a central site you have to pass through to reach other users; no direct communication, always an intermediary. We’re saying the same thing.
How does the talk daemon find the other user in the other machine?
the talkd man page describes the protocol but I’m not sure from that.
https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=talkd§ion=8