>> I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over.
> I find that Discord is bringing it back.
As though you could log into discord and start a conversation with someone who was only using facebook messenger, or snapchat, or twitter, or whatsapp or instagram or any other service where messaging was possible.
Discord in reality represents a different way of doing things. You can chat with other discord users. That's it.
It's a decent system when the userbase is big and the company is benevolent, but it's a different thing than everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.
But this never existed, nor is the author claiming that. AIM, ICQ, etc required you to create an account on their own service. XMPP might be used, but I don't think any major service besides Google Talk supported federation. What the author had was a single client that happened to connect to multiple services, but you can do the same nowadays (e.g. using Pidgin and its plugins).
(As an aside, it's refreshing to see how BS-free the announcement that GTalk supported federation was: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html)
For me, this is a real shame and a bit of motivation. In 2015 my friends and I were using teamspeak very heavily and essentially became power users. Everything setting or personality feature you could mess with we did and it was a ton of fun. We started a list of features we really wanted to add or tweak, mainly around text chat and email messaging within the program. There was also a ton of UI changes I wanted to make, don't get me wrong I love the program but it's hard on the eyes sometimes. Anyway, around this time I was really wanting to dig my teeth into a big project. I thought it would be super useful to remake teamspeak as an opensource webapp. I even went as far as creating some UI mocks but then Discord blew up and I gave up that idea.
I don't know, maybe I'll set aside some time to try this project again. I really wanted to create an open and free program that allowed anyone to hack on it or setup private services without needing to pay hefty licensing fees or go through untrusted networks. The Web 3.0 version of vent/ts with some Stallman ideals.
I worry about how hard it would be to do these days, though-- in addition to the Windows/Mac/Linux clients that you've always needed, your app has to work on iPhone and Android (including their many variations), and don't forget the web app! Plus audio/video chat.
Image/file uploading is pretty tricky, too. If you dragged an image into an IRC channel, nothing would happen and that was normal. But now people except it to be automatically uploaded to cloud storage, resized, stripped of metadata, and shown in the chat view for all to see. Features like this are deceptively hard, and there are many of them.
All of that is just to be feature-competitive with the stuff people are already using, before you get to the absurd difficulty of getting people to switch away from Discord.