Sure, but all of those things could have been done by extending the existing protocol.

Also, fwiw, it has had media sends, presence and support for encryption for a very long time. The rest could be added. All of those things could have very well been an IRC client with a couple of extra features and a server upgrade to queue messages.

And those developers get told what to do. The wheel also gets reinvented by PMs and entrepreneurs who think they can do it better. Sounds like someone is salty about their software maintenance job.

I suppose that applies more to XMPP, but not everything has to be a business, and you don’t have to be an ass about it.

fwiw, XMPP/Slack/Discord/etc basically solve the same problem that IRC already solved. Software Engineers just reinvent the wheel again and again as everyone loves a green field.

That said, Meta cannot be trusted. They’re going to do a year or two of embrace and extend, pretending to be good citizens. Then they will invent some crisis that causes them to want to de-federate, likely that content on other servers is not moderated to their standards or that convoluted features of their extended protocol are not being met. This take seems pretty spot on to me.