If you want to communicate with a person or organization in ways that don't involve online chat, you have a variety of standard ways for doing so: - E-mail add

If you want to communicate with a person or organization in ways that don't involve online chat, you have a variety of standard ways for doing so: - E-mail address - Phone number - Mailing address What is it about chat protocols that has resisted convergence on anything as remotely standard as these other methods? I mean, I could tell somebody that I spray-painted hieroglyphics on my house and that "there are 3 shipping companies in the world that know how to find my house using hieroglyphics so please ship through one of them", yet somehow my "address" has remained the sensible way to handle that problem. The problem isn't Slack or IRC or any other client, it's that we have any choices at all. At this point we don't need choices for chat protocols any more than we need a choice of ways to put an address on a house. The technical community needs to start loudly criticizing clients that aren't converging on some standard, and standardize more and more behaviors every year until it really doesn't matter what people are using.