[tlrobinson]

It's a little depressing Moxie believes federated protocols can't compete with unfederated/proprietary ones. I don't like the idea of all future innovation taking place in the Slacks and WhatsApps rather than the IRCs and SMTPs.

Are there any recent counter examples of successful federated protocols?

It would be an interesting thought experiment to design a protocol that started with the basic features of IRC and incrementally layered on new features in backwards compatible / gracefully degrading ways until you arrived at Slack. Of course it would be a lot easier with the benefit of hindsight than if you started in the 1980s.

[Arathorn]

That thought experiment lives today in the form of Matrix.org :)

[dlmetcalf]

Definitely check out https://matrix.org/ @tlrobinson!

It's all that and more. Not only does it have the basic features of XMPP+IRC (and others), but it also federates/bridges with those existing open standards! Plus supports WebRTC signalling and of course end-to-end 1:1 & group encryption (Olm/MegOlm).

There's a range of client, server and library options. Vector.IM (with web, iOS and Android clients) is a good place for many to start and you can try on an existing service. Then if you want, just fire up your own server and it'll federate with the rest.

If you only needed pure XMPP, Conversations.IM is superb too.