The reason all of those incompatible chat protocols pop up is that all of the popular federated protocols lack features like inline image transfer, a usable backlog, persistence, live previews or gimmicks like code formatting and editing and third party integrations.
People want those, and value them enough to give up federation.
Its threaded conversation model really helps with ignoring discussion about topics you're not interested in. When I get back to an IRC/Slack/whatever channel, I spend quite a while catching up. 99% of the conversation does not concern me, yet I have to read it. Zulip's threading is a great solution to this.
> What if your cronjob doesn't fire? What if LEs script has a bug and you're not up to date?
That's why I renew them a week in advance. I set up Nagios checks which alert me when a certificate is not renewed. Those were already in place before LetEncrypt since human error is just as likely as a script breaking.
Zulip (https://zulip.org/), a recently open-sourced Slack alternative, has a clever solution for this. They have a light-weight threading model which ensure that discussions stay within context. That way, you can just ignore discussions about topics you're not concerned with without missing anything else. It's great.
> Sometimes, important things get discussed when you’re not around. Unfortunately, so do a lot of unimportant things.
> Zulip makes it easy to review the conversations you missed, so you can focus on that important project without having to catch up on how Jim’s guitar lessons are going.
> I remember not long ago Mint included just about every browser media plugin ever made, including RealMedia, WindowsMedia etc., stuff that was obsolete 15 years ago. Maybe it still does.
What happened? :( I really liked that service.