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Chat is pretty trivial: Everybody logs into a server. One person types a line of text, and it replicates on everybody's computer.

It sounds like an exercise for a CS student's first TCP/IP program.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that there's something wrong about the modern Web when a chat program taking 500kb (gzipped!) is an impressive technical achievement to be proud of?

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It's the 80/20 ratio - going from working MVP of a chat app takes about 5kb, but then you have literally nothing else that makes something like linen or slack usable for lots of different edge cases (styling, file uploads, channels, UI, etc)

The text chat experience is something that has been so refined over the last 10 years that to meet today's expectations towards it, you need a very surprising amount of engineering.

It's something I didn't realized until I started coding it: every detail that you omit from your chat UX is a tragically noticable pain to the user used to WhatsApp and Slack 100 times a day.

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