The counterexample here would be Mastodon, which I believe now has more users than IRC and seems to be growing quite healthily. (And, AFAIK, isn't funded by any

The counterexample here would be Mastodon, which I believe now has more users than IRC and seems to be growing quite healthily. (And, AFAIK, isn't funded by any megacorps; it's actual grassroots FOSS.) When it comes to social media software, people care about two tightly-coupled things: if the people they need to talk to can be reached with it, and if the UX is good. (People abandoned IRC because its UX, which was never good, degraded to unusability in a multi-device not-always-online embedded-media world.) But there's nothing about federation that inherently requires bad UX. But federation generally means open-source (because there's no market pressure for interoperability), and open-source means bad UX. Mastodon owes 80% of its success to having been principally developed by somebody who knows how to make a goddamned webpage. The other 20% is that it's pretty easy to host. I think the really interesting takeaway is that the giants only don't support interoperability because they have a monopoly on good UX. If something highly usable and open-source appeared in the chat space and started gaining serious traction, the enterprise players would have to entertain the notion of playing ball and supporting the protocol – and if one of them did it, the rest would follow.