What bugs me the most about this sort of thing is that around 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem.
There was a short window when everyone was spread out over AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo’s Messenger, and Facebook all on PC before smartphones took off where you could use a third party program on your PC to log in to each of your messaging accounts and talk with everyone in one place. I remember using Trillian and Pidgin.
Then as smart phones took off, all the companies quadrupled down on the walled garden idea, most chat systems died off in favor of Facebook and text, and now that we have a new diaspora of chat systems we’re worse off than the late aughts. Technology was supposed to make shit easier and more interoperable, not worse and more walled off you corpo fucks!
A little off topic
We used pidgin for short while at work. I got a ticket that this lady was getting out of disk errors. It was a new laptop so I was confused. I couldn’t find the culprit right away and ran windirstat on it. Pigin had created a 200+GB log file in her profile. I couldn’t believe it. We stopped using it shortly after that.
Then as smart phones took off, all the companies quadrupled down on the walled garden idea
Yahoo and MSN had interop before smartphones existed. AIM and Google Talk (Jabber) as well.
When smart phones took off, Facebook Messenger actually had Jabber support (which also gave it interop with AIM and Google Talk).
The consolidation and walled gardens unfortunately came back later.
