There's been such an enormous amount of churn in the IM client market for an industry that hasn't seen significant innovation since the days of dial-up.
Of course, and we'll new dominant players in 5 years. My point is just that none of these do anything radically different from IRC. Channel-based as the primary mode (as opposed to direct) is a bit of paradigm shift in terms of UX, but it's just a veneer on group chats that have existed forever. And obviously, they've all been adapted to web/smartphones as opposed to terminal. But in terms of what kind of communication they enable, it's absolutely nothing new. I could do this kind of thing on Quantum Link on my Commodore.
>My point is just that none of these do anything radically different from IRC.
This is such an IRC user take. On the same level as not understanding what the point of dropbox is when FTP exists.
The failure of FOSS to understand what users actually want is the reason proprietary platforms took off. Matrix is the first attempt to create something similar to what users use and want.
I thought about writing a list of all the things I use on discord which IRC doesn't support but it would be a waste of time because its almost everything discord does. Even basic sending and receiving messages is close to impossible with irc on mobile unless you use a 3rd party service to translate the protocol in to something mobile friendly.
The big obstacle to sending video back in those days was one of bandwidth and storage space - it's not difficult to add to the protocols. IRC is a pretty well-known client for easily sending files - it's purely a design decision not to display them in-line like Discord and Slack.
The big revolution in IM clients/protocol was the move to mobile. All the old protocols require a constant connection to the server to receive new messages. They were not designed with push notifications in mind.
I remember some early IM clients for the iPhone that you had to keep open to be alerted to a new message. Not fun.
Stickers are such an underrated feature, especially platforms that allow user generated sticker packs. Its the number one feature on Telegram imo and the primary reason a lot of people I know use it over discord.
it's semantics without slavish adherence to syntax. it's really not that much of a stretch to see that the imbuing of ambiguity is a net positive to some people in some circumstances, and is a natural evolution of formalized language systems in a non-optimally constrained environment.
