Ah, well, I still disagree IRC was that. XMPP was that, and it saw widespread adoption up until Facebook and Google walled off their XMPP federation- slack eve

Ah, well, I still disagree IRC was that. XMPP was that, and it saw widespread adoption up until Facebook and Google walled off their XMPP federation- slack even disabled its XMPP bridge (that wasnt federated). Companies definitely killed that open protocol, though there could be arguments against XMPP: functionally they could have been worked around, there is just a significant financial incentive to not want to.