There was a brief moment in time where everyone used the same federated instant messaging protocol.
You could make an account on say, jabber.org or any other XMPP provider, and use it to chat to a friend even if they were using Facebook or Google Talk.
Eventually I guess the giants realised it was more profitable to hoarde all the users, rather than afford the maintenance burden of running common infrastructure for the greater good. So they defederated, and now almost nobody uses XMPP.
@exelotl@obsidianical@ipg I used AdiumX with Facebook at the time. Unless someone has a reference that says otherwise, I'm pretty sure Facebook used only XMPP C2S and never federated. If they did federate it must have been for a very brief moment.
You could access Facebook messages from an XMPP client but couldn't talk to people on e.g. jabber.org.
Google Talk federated and lured people in, then gradually defederated, degrading federation functionality over time, first you couldn't follow people but you could talk to people you already followed etc.
In this particular case Google was more insidious that Facebook and I dare say they single-handedly stopped the unification and standardization of messaging that XMPP was the direct driver for.
@drwho@exelotl@obsidianical@ipg Yeah, it really exposed the level of evilness. I mean, this kind of stuff was practiced by Microsoft for decades, but it was never quite so obvious until Google took it to the next level.
@exelotl@obsidianical@ipg It worked with Google, but I don't think FB ever federated even though they used XMPP.
The way Google did a bait and switch was very educational though, and taught us precisely what the end goal is when these companies adopt open standards.
And then they managed to completely screw up owning messaging, which is because they were incompetent.