If I stopped and looked at how many redundant apps I have right now that’d be wild. For messaging alone, I’m on iMessage, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, IRC, many in-app DM secondary tier feature chats, and perhaps a few other esoteric ones. Can we go back to just IRC please, those were the days for me.
I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use, and I could chat with anybody regardless of which service they were on. I didn't need half a dozen different apps running just to chat. It felt like a utopia compared to what we have today.
People tried to standardize on XMPP back in the day, but capitalism figured out that standardize didn't fit their profit motivation. These days XMPP is a bit of an dated XML-heavy protocol, but Matrix is a newer alternative, and it supports bridging.
While I agree with you, there's certainly other ways to make money in an open protocol. Email perhaps is a good example, we are still on SMTP/IMAP and there's lots of business built on custom clients and whatnot. (Ok, maybe not the best example haha but hopefully you get my point here)
Email is a glorious relic from the truly distributed internet that could have been...
That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.
The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.
The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)
I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.
The problem is that you cannot make as much money as you would by gatekeeping, which means billions of dollars of VC money goes to the gatekeeping app that offers its experience for free and no ads, and spends hundreds of million on ads, influencers, and partnerships to promote their offering and kill the open competition.
And once they’re entrenched enough that’s when they turn the screws on the customer.
Unfortunately our antitrust laws didn’t imagine a world where the marginal cost of serving a new customer was close to 0, so offering a product for free in order to kill competition doesn’t really trigger antitrust laws even though it’s the same kind of behavior.
I think the closest we came to something like this was Slack suing MSFT for bundling Teams, and that probably only stood a chance because of Microsoft’s history.
In the 90s and early 2000s, my MSN (personal chats with people I knew IRL), Yahoo Chat (chats with people I met in Yahoo Games), ICQ (strangers all over the world) all were different personas and server different purposes.
And yet using those different chat services would have been unimaginable if it wasn’t for Trillian and then later Adium when I moved to a Mac.
Combining them into a single app with a singular UI, the same KB shortcuts, and being able to easily control notifications etc was a game changer.
