Should internet based chat platforms develop a common protocol (like SMS for mobile networks) so that people don't all need to use the same app (Whatsapp and the like) to be able to have 1:1 or group chats?
(Before someone says I have rediscoered email -- I know email exists for a similar reason but not for instant messaging for a smartphone weilding generation)
What you've re-invented is XMPP.
The original Facebook Messenger and Google Talk both used XMPP, it has support for encryption and push notifications.... For a brief period, you could actually chat across ecosystems.
And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
We do have matrix now, but it's still largely irrelevant, and doesn't really feel fully baked yet.
At this point, all the major companies have a huge vested interest in keeping things closed.
Without blue bubble lock-in, I, and quite a few people I know, would ditch increasingly mediocre iPhones for Android, so apple has to keep building iMessage exclusive features and has to avoid ever releasing an iMessage android app (most recently, Apple Invites, which integrates with iMessage cleanly and is impossible for third-party apps to integrate so neatly).
I expect Apple to continue to leverage "Apple Intelligence" as a feature that only integrates well with iMessage so that they can continue to lock users in, and keep the conversation as far away from open chat protocols as they can.
In the AI age, unencrypted textual conversations are a new source of training data, so Instagram, Twitter, and Google want to keep their own messaging systems to themselves.
> And it died, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
I think this is more accurately
> And it was killed, everyone closed up their ecosystem.
Not to say there were not problems with XMPP or Matrix, "innovation" always feels slow because its federated, committee, opensource, etc.
XMPP it's still alive.
https://dsnp.org/dsnp_whitepaper.pdf
Begone blockchain whitepaper.
... Really though, if you've got a whitepaper from 2020 about "building a protocol", and 6 years later you've got exactly 0 users actually using the protocol, it's maybe not even worth linking.
Writing a vague hand-wavy paper that says "We need a distributed graph, we'll use blockchain, there are IDs" is very easy.
Getting enough users that people can talk to each other, that's hard, and real usable applications help with that, while whitepapers do not.
I always wonder what goes on in the minds of people who focus intensely on the technology and not the experience...
The experience is what people want. Not the technology. The technology is this thing that delivers the experience but the consumer does not need to know of its existence nor how it works.