[handrous]

Won't happen until grabbing everyone's data isn't a top priority for tech companies. They don't want you to be able to do stuff that they can't observe.

IOW we're stuck with a decaying protocol ecosystem—for messaging, and everything else—until we outlaw surveillance capitalism, which we probably won't do. Email wouldn't be able to take off if it were invented today, because it lets you use it without one company seeing everything. The state of things is really bad. It's a drag on productivity, with endless wheel-reinventing and deliberately-bad interoperability.

[orf]

I mean IRC doesn’t even support multiline messages let alone any of the other things that are table stakes for an actually worthwhile chat experience.

The success of slack and the failure of IRC has nothing to do with surveillance capitalism.