Discord is actually an interesting analogy because they share apple’s overall philosophy here. Discord doesn’t absolutely firewall themselves with attestation/etc but they will absolutely ban you for using alternative clients like Discord Advanced if they notice you behaving differently from an official client on the API. Some of the things the discord advanced client can do like animated smilies or cross-server smilies are things that discord has locked away behind a paywall (with no real technical basis) and that’s in conflict with how a small minority of users want to interact with the platform.

Should discord be forced to interoperate? Bearing in mind that of course forcing them open will undercut their whole business model - but that whole model is built on gouging consumers for trivial technical features that cost nothing to implement or support.

Similarly, while there is choice in the market (just like apple and android), it still doesn’t change the network-effect problem. If my friends are on discord, and I’m left in some group sms side chat, that’s not really a substitute, right?

Now layer on 30 years of brand warrior sports-team mentality and abrasive interactions in both directions, and you’ve roughly got the iMessage problem. But of course everyone likes discord…

I mean why shouldn’t I get to use discord for free like everyone else? And I also should get the paywalled features since it’s an arbitrary and abusive paywall and the environment has been designed to tacitly funnel you into using them. Isn’t that like, super abusive?

But we like discord…