>"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. I'd still ar

>"Centralization wins" is the wrong conclusion from this dataset. Discord & Slack have seen far more investment in UX & backend than IRC & Jabber. I'd still argue that it correlates with centralization. We could argue about causation but it still goes hand in hand IMO. A company is much less likely to invest resources into improving IRC or Jabber because if you made huge breaking changes you'd end up with an incompatible, custom fork of the protocol (negating the benefit of using a standard protocol, since you'd effectively lose the interop with third party client) and even if you kept the standards open and federation possible you're basically hurting your own business since you make it easy for people to use your work without giving you a way to monetize it. If your objective is to be profitable it makes a lot more sense to just create your own centralized, proprietary protocol and clients that you control end-to-end. Standardizing and federating your protocol is a massive amount of headache in the long run for very little benefit in terms of $$$.