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Comment by hammyhavoc | Hacker News Reader

No doubt it's going to be IM for most folks.

IM sucks hard. IM used to be great when it was based on open protocols so you could download Trillian on Windows or Adium on Mac and choose your client and communicate across a wide variety of protocols from the same context.

Now you have to download and run massive resource hogging apps like Team and Slack to simply communicate on 2 protocols.

Matrix protocol has over 60m publicly addressable accounts, and that's not even including all the EU gov, healthcare, military or emergency services. You can even bridge closed protocol apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord et al to your own Matrix Synapse server and get it all in a single client. Works great. Been using it for over a year, can even send files back and forth to people still on Messenger.

For IM, there is the wonderful Delta Chat.

Love delta chat

IM doesn't work unless everyone you want to keep in touch with is also on IM. I have regular, multiple-times-a-week email correspondents who are never on IM. They don't even keep their phones on enough for texting. It's email or nuthin'.

Have you tried talking to the TikTok generation? They don't do email. Most don't even sign into the email clients on their phones.

> Have you tried talking to the TikTok generation? They don't do email.

And before that it was Snapchat! Met some young people who wanted to keep in touch with me a few years ago and had this funny conversation about email after me saying I didn't have Snapchat or Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp. Oh, you can text me with SMS (that still works!) or email me!

There is just no single universally and actually used IM ecosystem and with the expression of unchecked capitalism Web 2.0 has become (see what happened to XMPP), there is no chance there will be one. Besides that the asynchronous nature of e-mail is a highly desirable feature for everyone who has actually things to do.

e-mail is here to stay.

60m publicly addressable users on Matrix protocol, not even including EU gov, healthcare, military, emergency services.

Nobody is saying email is going anywhere.

> the asynchronous nature of e-mail is a highly desirable feature

This is a good point and makes me wonder whether e.g. Matrix should incorporate something like a “prefers async” field that could be used by clients to treat messages more like mail.

This is an excellent idea - on a per-conversation granularity at least you could declare whether the intent of the conversation is sync or async, distinguishing IM from mail or forums.

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