In the old days there was IRC, which: - anyone could spin up a server - servers can link together, scalable - it's pretty much the absolute minimum you need

In the old days there was IRC, which: - anyone could spin up a server - servers can link together, scalable - it's pretty much the absolute minimum you need on top of TCP to implement a chat, so extremely lightweight and a server can literally handle 10s of thousands of users - anyone joins any server they want - decentralized - works over dial up - mature ecosystem - decades of time to work out kinks and issues - 7000 engineers? I can set up a server in about an hour. Has drawbacks but just saying, the future is in the past.