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This is what my group chats look like when texting with iMessage users.
Group chats over SMS? What kind of madness is that?
and this is just one small reason why the industry decided against moving forward with this decades ago. it simply didn't make any sense then, certainly doesn't make sense now.
Uhhh yes? That's the point? The alternative to this degraded experience is no experience at all.
The answer to that is: It depends.
For example, HTTP2 is basically an invisible upgrade which is faster (sometimes). If either end doesn't support it, falling back to a prior version is transparent to the user.
On the other hand, if you want to update IRC to be more like Slack/Discord, with features like oauth2 login? Well then clients that don't support it won't be able to connect.
so basically it's either degraded experience but w/ interoperability or great experience but w/o interoperability?
that doesn't really make sense. why not a third way with great experience and great interoperability?
i'm asking because i can guarantee that no one will use clients that provide a degraded experience when you've got the established players providing a great experience.
Somehow, ICQ worked wonderfully despite everyone I knew using an unofficial client. The official client (at least Windows one) was a terrible mess. It had ads and all those features no one ever asked for, like games and and news and an entire picture-based language (I'm not joking). But QIP, the client I used, only did the things I needed an ICQ client to do, and nothing more. It also had no ads.
Other than that, it can be death by a thousand cuts. If the rendering of a particular phrase relies on a specific custom feature, the other side might not see it properly. That can be multiplied by many times and make people frustrated, and worse, misunderstand each other.
