Ok? Kind of a non-sequitur there. Unsure how that's related to this conversation:

>> I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over.

> I find that Discord is bringing it back.

The article talks about how chat used to be a protocol, so you could talk between chat clients.

As though you could log into discord and start a conversation with someone who was only using facebook messenger, or snapchat, or twitter, or whatsapp or instagram or any other service where messaging was possible.

Discord in reality represents a different way of doing things. You can chat with other discord users. That's it.

It's a decent system when the userbase is big and the company is benevolent, but it's a different thing than everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.

> everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.

But this never existed, nor is the author claiming that. AIM, ICQ, etc required you to create an account on their own service. XMPP might be used, but I don't think any major service besides Google Talk supported federation. What the author had was a single client that happened to connect to multiple services, but you can do the same nowadays (e.g. using Pidgin and its plugins).

(As an aside, it's refreshing to see how BS-free the announcement that GTalk supported federation was: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html)

Proprietary chat servers were only "protocolized" after reverse engineering. I don't think any were ever openly soliciting other clients to connect to their network. There were also occasions when third party clients got locked out after a protocol change.

AIM was a walled garden too wasn't it?

Fairly, but the OSCAR protocol was reverse engineered pretty well, and so you could get on AIM through Pidgin, or Adium, or Meebo, etc etc etc