> Hopefully XMPP in the IM protocol incarnation can reunite the pitiful, broken up messenger world.

This doesn’t happen in a world where SV sets the standard.

First, it was a mistake to use XML. The issues with XML are well known so I won’t rehash them here, but if you really want some reading material, this[0] will suffice.

Second, end-to-end encryption by default is a critical necessity for any new standards. Having a central server to handle the key exchange is less than ideal, but still better than a total lack of encryption in most private communications because there is no shortage of entities looking to collect any kind of plain text traveling across the internet. At the very least, we can still make it expensive to process the private communications of private citizens.

Third, nobody makes money from IM being an open standard. The only ones with anything to gain from open standards IM are the people sending messages and potential new entrants into a market. Critically this leaves out existing interests with their own lock-in, app and sticker stores and payment processing services. You can’t make something like Animoji or Memoji a selling point for a new phone if you can suddenly use those features from a Samsung or OnePlus. It also leaves out VCs which are more interested in a good ROI than upending the world of messengers to make it a better place. The alignment of interests just isn’t there.

Fourth, for any kind of federated messenger system to take off and stay federated, you would need to be able to run your own server to connect to maintain your online presence, and make your own client to access your server. Not everyone would do this, and not everybody would have to, but you would most likely run into the issue of not enough people choosing to, with not enough back ends or front ends being developed and only a handful of the ones that are being worthwhile to actually use. Then once you decided there’s a better way to do X and try to change the standard to reflect this improvement, you would see delays in actually implementing this new method across different servers and clients causing the stack to become fragmented and frayed on both ends. Oh and this still doesn’t really make anybody enough money to actually be worth the effort.

In the end XMPP failed to shake up the messenger world because it just wasn’t a great standard, and any commercial interests that brought it to the mass market eventually phased out support because maintining even an XMPP gateway just wasn’t worth the opportunity costs and labour for what amounted to an extra bit of technical debt that hardly anybody even used. It didn’t make money, and it’s only real feature was an anti-feature to interests demanding some kind of lock-in.

Strangely enough you probably could use a blockchain to resolve some of the issues I raised, but you would still have to contend with the issue of making money and convincing enough people or coercing enough entities to actually make it into the messenger standard. Why bother when you could just use Slack with its craptastic Electron clients or iMessages or whatever the Google Messenger-of-the-Day is? Or whichever Messenger basically replacesd SMS in the country you live and any supplementary messenger you might need is right there in the App Store?

[0] http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML