The continued fragmentation of chat into walled gardens is really annoying. I feel like Matrix has done a good job not only designing their protocol to be open and federated from the start, but also in that they are actively working to provide bridges to other services. It would be really nice if keybase would work to federate with Matrix servers.
(Link to Matrix service, since they have an un-googleable name: https://matrix.org. The only working client that I know of at the moment is https://riot.im)
I am convinced that we are cursed to relive this nightmare once a generation:
1. Some chat application blows up in popularity.
2. Everyone looks around and says "Hey, that's an easy problem, let's build a competitor but with feature X and Y!"
3. We are stuck with a nightmarish number of chat apps until someone reverse engineers the protocols for each.
4. The bubble bursts and everyone realizes there wasn't any money in it anyway and goes off to doing something more interesting (like building better PKI).
5. ~10 years goes by and someone finds a new chat niche and the cycle repeats itself.
Yeah, though IRC seems to have weathered the years fairly well (at least with its core audience), and it's an open and federated protocol. Since Matrix bridges to IRC, and adds some features that you used to need IRC bouncers and such to get, and is federated itself, my (possibly naive) hope is that it can evolve into something at least akin to a "next generation" IRC with first-class support for E2E encryption and various other chat features that people tend to like these days.
(Link to Matrix service, since they have an un-googleable name: https://matrix.org. The only working client that I know of at the moment is https://riot.im)