Some weeks ago, I’ve come across Delta Chat, whose main thing is “(near) instant messaging using your email”
That left me thinking, has this been attempted before? If not, why? Also, why (besides servers’ limitations as means to fight spam) isn’t this solution used more often, given that e-mail has been a decentralized solution for well over 40 years now?
Besides the other reasons here the biggest reason IM took off is the “I” part of the name. Email measures its SLAs in days. A lot of the retry intervals are set 4 hours with timeouts of 72 hours. It wasn’t designed to be “Instant”. Granted probably 90%+ of email gets delivered in under 5 minutes, but imagine having a chat and your responses are delayed 4 hours. Just send an email at that point.
not only that, but intermittendly delayed. Very possible that it will be instantanously 99% of the time, but randomly a message will be delayed by hours and you will probably not even know it
I once tried to explain instant messaging to an older woman but she didn’t get the difference to email because she’d regularly use them to instantly chat with her son. That was two or three decades ago. While in theory emails can take days to be delivered the reality is that for a human it is “instant”.