For what its worth, threaded conversations with multi-media experience existed long before any of the current and popular chat platforms. Usenet by design was

For what its worth, threaded conversations with multi-media experience existed long before any of the current and popular chat platforms. Usenet by design was threaded, allowed binary uploads, is highly distributed, fast and resilient. Clients are very light weight. The downside of them today being spam. Surely that could be solved with signed messages or something else. A big upside to usenet in my opinion is the lack of censorship.