there are different definitions for being distributed.

IRC is a distributed system much like a CDN is distributed, that is spread across the network.

what we are actually interested in is distributed ownership.

email is that, as is the web, but IRC is not

This is exactly what OP was referring to: that's what you are actually interested in, but not everyone.

yes of course, the article is giving examples how systems with distributed ownership are failing because not everyone cares about that. so distributed ownership is what she is interested in, and hence that is the topic of our discussion.

That may be so, although the author's own words doesn't clearly state that ("To clarify what I mean by decentralised: applications whose main purpose is fulfilled as part of a network, where that network is not reliant on any preordained nodes." - nothing about ownership there. Master<->Master db replication meets that definition, but is petty clearly not the type of thing you are referring to. Regardless in context you're probably right abouy which definition the author is using).

Nonetheless, that doesn't make it any less of a problem that the definitions are severely overloaded. The issue is not that the article is unclear in its definitions (even though it is imo), the issue is that its hard to have discussions about the topic and compare to other articles, because people talk past each other. Words having agreed meanings is important so we can connect ideas to a broader context and not just talk about individual articles in isolation.

Given the history of efnet, i actually think irc fits really nicely into the author's premise.

well not quite. since nicks and channels are replicated across all servers it should be clear that any irc op can control all nicks and channels. hence control is centralized and its merely distributed-replicated on a technical level even if governance is so trusting as to allow anyone to join.

distributed ownership, aka federation does not require trust between operators as each operator is trusted only to manage their own servers without being able to control entities that originate from other servers