People do care, it just seems as though they care about their pet peeves more.
* This eliminates the whole issue for users (I don't want to have to remember 40 million passwords, and I don't want to rely on Google as my SSO).
* It helps the developer because all he has to do is implement one protocol (rather than make 8 different accounts to register passport.js with).
* It helps the tin-foil hatters like me, because I can revoke access from any source at any time & if my account gets compromised I call my buddy Bill hosting the IDP and invalidate my credentials.
I've been working on this problem on and off for about 10 months, the last 4 of which have been fairly rigorous. I've got a solution for the "buddy" willing to host the IdP. https://github.com/bergie/passport-saml is a low friction add-on to your node app for the developers. The last piece of the puzzle is dev adoption (i.e., getting traction on par with LetsEncrypt) to actually spend 5 minutes for that passport-saml stuff.
The other issue is developing an easy solution (easier than SSO with Google) done by mobile App authentication. User-flow is basically: you click "Login with <name>", the IdP forwards the message to your mobile via APN, and you swipe left or right to auth. That's the last technical barrier (user adoption is 80% of the problem). I need to take ~3 mo off and pony up high-five, low-sixes in fees re: getting a great UX guy (I'm abysmal [[if you're great at UX, contact me]]), lawyers, liability insurance, a security firm to audit, etc (there's already a monetization model for this venture, though the whole thing will be GNU AGPL[3] / free for universities / research institutions, etc.)
[0] Like, in the formal mathematically proven sense, both in concept, and implementation (though which one slips my mind).
[1] http://wso2.com/library/articles/2010/07/saml2-web-browser-b...
[2] Encryption is basically a subset of privacy, which I think we have a constitutional right to, though other people object.
[3] The whole point is to do this first as a human good, but profiteer off expensive licenses a la Exchange modules, et al. I don't really want to shop around Sandy Hill but if any of you successful Angels (who are historically privacy advocates, I'd give Karsten Nohl or DJB (or hell, PG if you're reading this message haha, 30% and 2 seats in a second, but Larry Ellison could offer 3MM for .1% and that meeting would conclude rapidly) are interested, e-mail me me -- we'd be able to go to market a lot quicker with 2 or 3 FTE's. I'm going to complete this anyways, but we're fighting cryptowars again so there might be a rush.
The problem is non-techies do not understand why email is good while messaging is bad. There is no indication as to where these problems would come from, and they have no insight into why the problem happens in the first place, while they gleefully eat up iMessage / Facebook Messenger / Skype / Hangouts / Whatsapp.
The real difficulty is convincing grandma that she needs to leave "AOL".
Also, running torrents is different from getting all the DNS set up and forwarding all the ports. And even then, where I live, out of the 10 or so fiber providers I can choose, I know that only 2 allow me to do anything with port 25.
It can be a Pita.
https://xmpp.net/directory.php
Similarly how it's done with mail.
Especially Jabber/XMPP was created to fix that issue by standardizing the protocol. The idea is that IM would be like email - no central server.
Others (GTalk, Facebook, WhatsApp, HipChat to name few) started implementing it but did not enable server to server communication (ok GTalk did, but as soon as they became popular they intentionally broke it with Hangouts).
So now we have bunch of services that use same protocol but still can't communicate with each other, the XMPP seems like it is dying.
A while ago there were plenty of server-side transports to help migrate to XMPP, but it doesn't seem like they are no longer being developed.
I don't understand why no one cares anymore about decentralizing and standardizing IM.