...I have trouble because I need to run 5 IM client in the same time to be connected to everybody I care about. It's like I would need 5 different e-mail client just to get my e-mails from everybody.
In todays world everybody say we should work together share knowledge but at the end it seems to me nobody (at least from big corporates) wants it in big just in-house.
What do you think about the following
Could we have a global namespace for IM just like we have for e-mail? What could be a drawback? I mean we need to deal with SPAM... :-o If we would have a globaly uniq account name we could have a minimal protocol for inter-system communication for at least
- direct messaging
- group chat
- file sending (limitted size)
- WebRTC (signaling)
- optionally end-to-end encryption
So instead we try to connect to other systems there should be a standard (in e-mail sending we name it smtp:) for server to server communication between different systems everybody shall follow. And we won't end up with: https://xkcd.com/927/
With this we could have good things from both worlds:
- interconnectivity
- and the solutions could continue to compete with extra in-house features
The decentralized social networking folks now have a W3C recommended standard: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
What about IM?