It's not apples to oranges, it's directly analogous: both represent federated networks on the internet where users have the freedom to decide which client they want to use and which servers they want to connect to.

They are not analogous. IRC is a chat protocol with semantics suitable for a chat protocol. HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for whatever you want to send. It doesn't have any significant semantic implications for sites like Twitter.

> HTTP is at this point just a transport level thing for whatever you want to send.

So what? They're analogous not identical. The distinction you point out isn't relevant to the point of the analogy.

You wrote:

> switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.

irc and http are the same in this respect, thus they are analogous.