2022-11-01: Why Isn't There A Standard IM Protocol?
And why do I have five apps that do the same thing?
It's fucked that the closest thing we ever had to a standardized, widely-used IM protocol was IRC. It makes no sense to me. On a fundamental level (as I understand it, at least), emails and instant messages are basically the same thing, merely presented and used differently. An email is a message, a mailing list is a chatroom, contacts are friends, etc etc. You could take something like 90% of IMAP and SMTP or whatever, tweak it a little bit, and build an open messaging protocol with it and it would work fine.
And yet, somehow, this does not exist. The internet has been around for nearly 40 years and I still have to be using the exact same messaging service as a friend to send them a photograph of a dog. Why can't I send a message to someone on Telegram from Discord? Or to someone on Facebook Messenger from WhatsApp? To someone on Skype from Signal? All of these apps do ~90% of the same exact thing, and yet there is zero fucking interoperability. There is absolutely no reason for things to be this fragmented and shitty in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty two. I resent the fact that I have to use five different messaging apps that all do pretty much the same thing to talk to the people I care about, and you should too.
Can you imagine if email and telephone service was like this? Imagine if you could only email other people who used your email provider. Imagine if you could only call other people who were on your phone network. That would suck, wouldn't it? Now think about how often you call or email people versus how often you IM them.
This situation wouldn't be so bad if at least these zillions of IM services at least allowed people to use third party clients. In the past, this was the case, and it allowed people to create applications like Pidgin that simultaneously supported multiple different chat services. Sadly, the parasite class eventually realized that this sort of faux-interop inhibits their ability to hold you hostage and spy on you. Most modern IM services will, at best, do everything they can to make this difficult. Many will even ban users who use any third party applications. They want to hold you hostage. Thanks capitalism!
And just to add insult to injury, I suppose, a lot of these shitty silo'd services actually use XMPP, an open decentralized email-like IM protocol, and just don't let you use it to talk to people on the outside. We're so goddamn close.