I am very excited about the prospect of having federation between communication platforms... imagine sending messages from iMessage to whatsapp?! great, just like in the mid-00's!
funnily enough i was working on apps that did this back in the mid 00s. it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up. in the end it was better for the end user not use those standards and instead we rolled our own.
could be different story today but i don’t think so. just the video call feature would be an absolute mess to standardise. hell, even emojis would open up a can of worms. payments between contacts? contacts themselves? i fear this would end up being the mid 00s again.
The best chat application I ever used was Pidgin circa 2008. It was so easy to be able to talk to all my friends across several different protocols in a single program.
Or rather: developers were so up their own backsides that effectively refused to cooperate. Obviously you go faster if you don't have to talk to anyone, and everybody loves lock-in. Which is why this legislation is welcome.