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by GuB-42 2762 days ago
Examples of differentiation:

- Signal end-to-end encryption

- Discord game integration

- Slack history keeping

- Skype ability to make phone calls

- Snapchat self destroying pictures

You may not see any use in any of these but some people do.

And some reasons why these aren't standardized:

- it is hard to do without some form of centralization (ex: history keeping)

- some services cost money (ex: phone calls)

- some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)

- owning a popular messaging network is simply too appealing

2 comments

It's funny that you mention slack's edge as history keeping, which is a premium feature you need to pay for after a threshold... Skype and many others will always keep all of your history for free
> - some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)

I still don't buy that. If you do search client-side, then history should be trivially searchable even under E2E encryption.