Internet chat is a long time passion of mine, from both just using it and the infrastructure around it. I started on IRC and still maintain my own server of like 20 people who use it to shitpost. Bots are easy to make, the protocol is simple (except for MODE), clients are simple, but it does lack "modern features", which brings me to my main point.

People are stubborn. I wouldn't go as far as to lable people "stupid", because they have reason to be stubborn. IRC caught on because it was the only game in town, not off of any technical merits. This meant that people were more than happy to put in the extra effort to get online and experience the miracle that is global communication at the press of a button. Nowadays, they have that, combined with voice, video, images, reactions, games, alerts, all the bells and whistes, all in their pocket. You remove one of those things, and now you have an inferior experience. That's not also counting the fact that the interface will be different, so there's even more learning.

The best option you have, as a developer, is to just clone a market leader to the best of your ability. Nothing wrong with that, and it will only help adoption, though some people might side-eye you. Fluxer is doing this the best in the market. I tried to make my own clone and not only was it a painful amount of work, but it turns out that I need to work as well and that eats up time.

Anyway, my seven letters to seven churches chats:

Discord

I have maintained many bots for Discord, and they revoked my privileges as they slowly closed the developer features. This compounded banning of 3rd party clients, closed source nature, suspicious funding sources, and locking away of so much information adds up to you reading this right now.

Telegram

Solid platform, I'll grant them that. However the requirement of a phone number and the fact that their encryption boils down to "my brother wrote it" is concerning.

Matrix

Started on solid ground but the clients are very lacking, the protocol is a bit unstable, the servers are not performant, and the focus on encryption is actually a detriment.

Click here to see my rant on chat encryption

I love encryption, it's useful and everyone needs to have access to it. However you cannot make it a selling point or the 100% core feature. The reasoning for this is quite simple:

• Someone will register, see: "SAVE THIS FILE OR WRITE DOWN THESE WORDS SOMEWHERE SAFE OR YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO RECOVER YOUR ACCOUNT!"
• They won't, or will just like toss it in their documents
• They'll lose it
• They'll get mad and never use your platform again

Encryption needs to be something added, or your platform won't be for the average person. If you are leaking state secrets? Use something made for that, like I2P, or Tor (if it's not US secrets :^) ). Having encryption as a default, or at least heavily tied to your account makes friction (or a time bomb) for your users who don't care at all about it. Give them the ability to go OTR or something similar, and those that truly desire it will self-segregate.

Slack / Mattermost

Slapping these two in here just to laugh at them. Slack sucks horribly (took 2 minutes at 100% CPU this morning to load) and has many connectivity issues. Truly deserves to be banished to business only. Avoid it if you can.

Mattermost, I believed in for a bit. However their gimping of the open source version burned all goodwill anyone reasonably had with them. Also they don't really have good voice support.

Mumble

Mumble, my beloved. Best voice experience for a desktop computer. But that's where it stops. No persistent chat, bad image support, funky client, not great mobile support. I'll still use it for that purpose with my friends, but man...

Revolt / Stoat

So close... I understand the desire to want it to be a single community, but being able to efficently self-host is a huge draw to me. I wish to gain power, then do nothing with it.

Teamspeak

lol, lmao.