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?
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”.