Messaging is a fractured nightmare on today's internet. There've been a lot of messengers for a long time.. AIM, QQ, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo! so many that 3rd-party clients such as "Trillian" became popular, to have one application that aggregates your messaging applications into a mostly unified experience. What confounds me is how little progress has been made during my lifetime in unifying these platforms. The problem has only gotten worse with time.

I realize peoiple have different views and requirements, but I'd think we'd have a better standard for federated communications besides e-mail.

Nowadays, there are so many methods for contacting someone, I have many parallel chat threads, with many people, across many platforms. To enumerate all the ways I could call someone with my phone, it's almost endless. I suppose that is refreshing in a sense, to have so many ways to perform end-to-end encrypted calls and video. Truly, a valuable feature beyond measure, yet the most common denominator still wins: people still have PSTN numbers , which offers no such encryption or security, let alone video!

federation, stagnation

XMPP , the "extensible messaging and presence protocol" seeks to offer a federated solution to messaging platforms. It is the core technology behind a lot of well known platforms such as WhatsApp. Anyone can spin up their own instance, hosted on their own domain, and begin exchanging messages with anyone who also has a server. It's very similar to e-mail in this way.

The community around XMPP seems fairly active, at least they produce a lot of specifications and standards. Anything that some modern messaging application achieves, often ends up as a specification for XMPP at some point, even stories the feature that has found its way into every app it seems, even Signal has managed to stuff in a stories feature. Somewhat comically it has an app-level configuration flag to disable it entirely. I imagine there was a lot of internal conflict at Whisper Systems when implementing stories.

Yet, with this, XMPP has stagnated. Fractured in its own ways, the XMPP landscape had far too many clients, servers and confusion behind usage for the average person, and it's mostly been abandoned.

a glimmer of hope, extinguished

For a short period of time, Google's GChat which was utilized XMPP, and was available in the majority webmail client, GMail. That really empowered XMPP (called Jabber at the time) and gave it a lot of users out the door. Like all things good made by Google, it was shut down hastily and prematurely. Google notoriously destroys everything good they create.

Someone high up at Google has a saying:

If it ain't broke, keep fucking with it 'til it is, then get rid of it forever.

Anyway, they shutdown GChat, to create Hangouts, which was also short lived. Then they had something called Alo and something called Duo (for some reason video and chat they wanted split?) those failed almost immediately. Now... there is nothing, no chat features. My guess is they want you to talk to their AI offering, Gemini, more than they want you to talk to other humans.

the famous 'clipper chip'

a future is possible

There could be a future still for XMPP. A lot of companies have came to the conclusion to use it as a basis for their messaging features. What I think needs to happen is that there needs to be more demand from customers for features that are interoperable. However, these days companies don't really care what the customer wants, it's about what their shareholders want.

If some large company such as Meta or Google were to bring back an XMPP service en masse that permits federation, we could be in a new world of messaging. I think something like that could easily take over the silos we see today: iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber, Line, WeChat. These are the biggest platforms across the world, and none of them are good.

The best of the commercial options I've found to be Signal messenger . Until recently they required sharing ones phone number to become contacts, but more recently this has been changed such that you can associate independently of your phone number.