Well, they weren't really standards by design either, people just reverse engineered their protocols. One could still do that, it's just that... nobody does anymore?
The countless matrix bridges[1] to Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, etc. that are actively maintained, together with dozens of Pidgin plugins[2] serving similar purposes suggests otherwise.
Granted, I don't expect Pidgin plugins to be well maintained compared to the Matrix appservice bridges. But still, there is at least one protocol that bridges to almost everything, and that's Matrix. For several years I used Matrix
as little more than a glorified IRC and Slack client.
Oh no, people have tried to reverse-engineer apps like Signal or Discord. The problem is that the company starts aggressively banning every user of the reverse-engineered clients, as well as mounting legal attacks on their authors.
