[singpolyma3]

> when AOL Instant Messenger, Trilian, Purple, Yahoo, ICQ, etc all interoperated

Sorry to remind you, but this never happened. AIM and ICQ eventually interoperate because they were owned by the same company at that point. There was never XMPP federation in the mix here.

[Groxx]

Yea, it was really only ever "libpurple let you easily use them all in one app nearly transparently, and many people did". Many did use XMPP under the hood, but afaik almost literally none federated.

Matrix is seemingly trying to leverage that memory, but "there's a bridge bot somewhere that you can run somehow, with extremely widely varying quality / integration smoothness" is rather different.