In the past 30 years I've used email, and close to three dozen different messaging solutions that each came and went.<p>Patterns why none of these chat solutions really stick long:<p>- Lack of standardization and ecosystem. There are multiple standards of course. But unlike email, none of the standard based products ever managed to become entrenched enough such that the rest of the market could not afford to ignore the standard. Jabber for example never really ended up mattering because at no point did it get over ever a percent of user adoption. Email had the advantage that you could email the whole world or only people inside a single company with corporate mailing systems. By the time MS figured out that they wanted in, they tried really hard to change that but never really were able to make people use their protocols rather than SMTP for delivering emails. For better or worse, that's how mail gets delivered.<p>- Walled gardens where companies jealously aim to keep all competitors outside. Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. each had a go at this space with long forgotten products. And some of the products that disrupted those are also long gone.<p>- Reinvention of the same wheels over and over again. It's disgusting how close e.g. ICQ was in functionality to things like Signal and Whatsapp. That was in the late nineties! This space is running around in circles. Arguably it had some useful features that some contemporary products still lack.<p>- Federation is consistently rejected as a feature by new players and a contributing factor for their inevitable demise; even if initially successful. What matters more to people is who they can chat with than what the feature set is when they are chatting. Whatsapp cleverly capitalized on that end ended up disrupting lot of entrenched things simply by offering wider access to essentially everyone with a phone, which at this point is most of the planet. Of course, whatsapp's popularity has suffered a lot in recent years courtesy of Facebook doing what every other big company has done in this space historic: get overly possessive and throw out the baby with the bathwater. Signal is backed by the Whatsapp founder. And ironically repeats most of its mistakes.<p>- Users inevitably try out a new app and as they move, some apps go in and out of favor. And since they don't federate, users go where the other users are.<p>Wake me up when Telegram, Whatsapp, Signal, whatever the hell Google is calling their chat app this month, iMessage, etc. can talk to each other. I have close to a dozen chat and messaging apps on my phone and they all get used. It's beyond ridiculous. All proprietary walled gardens with enough people in them that I somehow need to be there as well.<p>That's why email is still a thing. Because when you have to reach somebody, you send them an email. Instead of playing roulette with your selection of chat apps to see which one of those might get a response. Pun intended of course, chat roulette was a thing at some point.