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 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 like, 90% of the same goddamn shit, 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.
