Downvoted because this is the comment equivalent of the manager walking into a technical discussion of how something should work and demanding "just make it work" and leaving. Or commenting on a war topic "I just want peace I don't care how it happens".
Like, you and everyone? But that doesn't make concerns like "people who don't use Facebook don't want their photos routed through Facebook servers without their knowledge or consent" magically vanish. There's a reason federated open protocol multi-service clients never became dominant and it's not because the problem space is trivial. "Just make it work" gets you iMessage, and that slurped your SMSs through Apple servers without telling you, which is still one of the cheekiest most unbelievable things I'd heard of at the time, despite that being tame by big tech company standards today.
Anyway, maybe I wasn't being precise enough, more precisely I meant Unicode, anything that can send Unicode with file attachments works for me which is every message service already. All the other extra stuff apple and google do with custom emoji and other things like that is irrelevant to me and I would happily give it up to have all written communication in one client with one red dot showing unread messages and one list of contacts.
WRT to privacy concerns, maybe my dream client lets me prioritise which services I prefer and it drops down to the lowest common denominator. So I could prefer Matrix > Signal > Telegram > iMessage > WhatsApp > Email > (the google one?) > Facebook Messenger for starting new chats or groups. I don't see what else you can do as some people can only be contacted on Facebook messenger; either you stick to your principals and your kids don't go to football club or you suck it up and use Facebook for that chat?
Companies want to get users into a walled-garden where they can target them for financial and political gains.
Democracy trying to push things away from the latter seems good. Do you agree?
I'm sure other people in a similar position will also know what I'm talking about.
It was super lightweight, cheap, multiplatform - when I was interning in Singapore in 2012, I was able to stretch a 2MB pay as you go SIM plan over 2 months using WhatsApp over WAP on a Symbian iPhone.
There are few things I will be more loyal to.
Now, with my biases declared, I am genuinely open to understanding why SMTP/IMAP based chat didn't take off. I don't know much about the protocols but as you say, email should have solved this problem. But somehow it lacked that immediacy of instant messaging that made me feel that much more connected to my family halfway across the planet.
Maybe that's what it was - email delivered in 1-5 seconds is completely fine, but instant messaging needs to be delivered in under 500ms ideally.
Is there something about the email protocol that makes it slower due to some tradeoffs?
The email client was much clunkier, presumably because it had to support all the other usage patterns of email.
Worth noting this was a phone that didn't have a touch screen and I was inputting via the numpad
