It remains something of a testament to human stupidity and avarice that chat to most of the world in most languages with pretty good security and even some video support was basically a solved problem in like 2008 and a complete clusterfuck again by 2016.
And probably soon enough again with the crap being pulled by FB to turn away from the WhatsApp monopoly.
I hope this time people will understand that the app isn't what matters, but the protocol is (with providers coming and going without that meaning to have to restart over and over again somewhere else and losing everything and everyone in the process).
I wish for open and federated protocols to gain recognition and adoption up to a point where we could just move on with the drama, ah!
I'm not aware of how good the clients worked at the time, but I believe there still are some features that were developped in the meantime that were not there:
- privacy in general, with asynchronous e2ee with forward secrecy and minimization of metadata
- reactions. They might sound childish but they're a good way of acknowledging something without polluting the chat itself
- proper support of files, including easy display of all media and search
- probably the biggest: voice/video calls. "Some support" clearly wasn't good enough.
Now it's a really hard place for Pidgin to sit in, because it can only follow what the protocols do, not push them to do more or to standardize.
