> i think you're romanticising things.

I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.