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by Muehe 1278 days ago
Curiously many of the messengers you mentioned are or were at least initially based on the same protocol, XMPP, some of them even were interoperable for a time[0]. There are still attempts at realising interoperability, notably libpurple[1], but they are fighting a constant uphill battle. Sadly companies usually just have more incentives to either keep their services walled off or extend only theirs in functionality, rather then keeping them interoperable. This would only change through regulation, or I suppose if a federated service gains enough traction to become the de-facto standard, but given the fate of XMPP that seems unlikely.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)