Comment by otterley
13 hours ago
We had XMPP, and even Google Chat used that in the early days.
It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.
The issue isn't closed vs open but business models. The reason most services don't support third-party clients is that their business model is based on advertising (aka wasting the user's time) and a third-party client would reduce said wasted time.
A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.
Right. Unfortunately, people have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets, and prefer to pay with their time and attention (and ignore the fact that they're being psychologically manipulated into buying random products and services) than with actual cash.
I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.
This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.
The problem is that there's not much of a market for an ecosystem of commercial chat clients that use open standards underneath. It's not like it hasn't been tried. What ultimately ends up happening is the market becomes a race to the bottom, chat clients become a commodity product, and innovation ceases. It's essentially what happened with Web browsers and why we don't have a particularly robust for-profit market in that space.
Google Chat used XMPP to build an user base and then cut it off from the Jabber network. That's when I stopped using it. Or was it when it got integrated into Gmail? Then they rebranded it and binned each iteration several times.
Similar to Slack and IRC? I guess that's just part of the enshittification process.