> people prefer Discord to IRC ... prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber
"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.
Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.
>"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber.
I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO.
A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber
because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible,
custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol,
since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if
you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting
your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without
giving you a way to monetize it.
If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create
your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control
end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of
headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.
"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. Because chat is addictive, relatively easy to implement, and easy for users to access via website or app, there's huge incentive roll your own chat service, and then incentive to differentiate from innumerable competitors. Many users are on half a dozen chat sites.
Email is going strong, even tho it's seen rather little UX investment. Decentralization is one feature keeping it afloat in a world of uncountable chat alternatives.