Comment by inopinatus

Good thought re.H.323, it is often forgotten in these discussions, in part because many implementers resent binary protocols and the ITU has few friends outside the telephony world. https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/

The IRC protocol is neither sophisticated nor scalable enough that we can all federate our private trusted IRC servers. IRC services are severely limited by being a brittle undirected acyclic graph of servers with little but text forwarding in the protocol. Trying to do anything sophisticated like e.g. identity management, is an ugly business.

NNTP has no identity scheme and no private channel. Running it over TLS doesn't change that. You can forge an ersatz private channel with encryption (I once did so, using Usenet as a message queue to backhaul out-of-band service alerts) - but it's neither pretty nor grandma friendly.