[nickjj]

Ah, history is mostly repeating itself (minus the need for government intervention ~20 years ago).

We had similar issues in the late 90s / early 2000s with ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Chat, etc..

Apps like https://www.pidgin.im/ existed to let you check everything within 1 app because all of these apps spoke the same protocol or close enough that things mostly worked.

[albertzeyer]

This is a bit different though.

It's one thing to allow independent applications to use the protocol and service, like Pidgin and others. And also many services did not like this and repeatedly changed their proprietary custom protocol to make this difficult.

It's another thing to be interoperable between services. Then you could continue to use only one service but still be able to talk to people on other services.

[nickjj]

Yeah that's true, in the Pidgin case you were still signing up for each service independently. Pidgin let you communicate through its app instead of the service provider's app. None of the service providers had data about the others.

I'm not sure how they plan to make things fully interoperable. Wouldn't that mean every chat app would need a complete chat history for every user multiplied by every chat app out there? Or instead they introduce a shared parent company / govt. entity where all chat messages are sent through, stored and pushed to users. Time to bust out the tin foil hats!

[Cerium]

I think you could make it work with only some username namespace. Eg: whatsapp.cerium vs fb.cerium. Facebook would forward messages to whatsapp usernames and vice versa.