That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent platforms are privately owned servic

That's the obvious stance to take though. The point is that IM has problems, IMO the largest of which is that all prevalent platforms are privately owned services rather than being a protocol like email is. Sure you may have a gmail address, but you can talk freely to any other email address. That's not the case for iMessage vs FB Messenger vs Slack vs Signal vs WhatsApp vs TikTok vs Telegram vs hundreds if not thousands of other independent platforms. My understanding is that this is the point of Matrix, i.e. to create an open protocol that you can use for IM regardless of who serves your messages. But the point of saying "just use email" is that we don't need anything new, we just need to shift our idea of what email is. It's only slow and clunky because we still think if it as such. Our email clients and infrastructure are all built around email being something you get around to checking, like a digital version of your physical mailbox. But it doesn't have to be this way. You have a uniquely identifying email address, and everyone you know does too, this should be all we need to have communication that's as responsive and highly compatible as we want/need it to be.