The recent discussions about the decentralization tag made me wonder: is email a successful decentralized system? From my perspective, email has its flaws (mostly no encryption, strapped-on security with SPF/DKIM, and… interesting HTML implementations), but is overall a great system from a decentralization perspective: it is (relatively) easy for me to run an email server and no one is the wiser. So the main question of this post is: what makes this so much harder for chat? Is it a lack of standardization, encryption, history preservation? Or is email not as wonderful as it seems? IRC, besides its lack of formatted messages, is also an interesting “decentralized” protocol to me: each user ends up running their own bouncer. I know this post contains some innaccuracies, but I think it will generate good discussion :)