What you are lamenting the lack of is the 'presence' indicator, where you can set yourself Available, Away, Busy, or simply Offline. Of the current crop of IM clients, only Skype still has it (I think).

Of the older IM clients; Lync had it, so did Lotus Sametime, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and of course AIM.

Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even when we're not.

This completely supports the idea that when you use a free service, you are not the customer.

Away/busy messages and invisibility are comforts for users. They go away when execs see that doing so bumps some (probably bullshit anyway) "engagement" metric by 5%.

Discord has presence indicators and is fairly widespread.

Slack has an 'online indicator' and even AIM-style away messages.

But slack also has no inherently established paradigm of real time vs asynchronous communication.

>Somewhere along the line the presence feature got dropped, and now we're always 'Available' even when we're not.

Before you were only available when you had your PC on, you were connected to the Internet, and your IM program was open. Now you carry your perpetually running IM program in your perpetually on and perpetually connected mobile in your pocket.

In other words, better is worse, New Jersey style.

> With Facebook Messenger, everyone who has the app is always "online."

Not exactly, FBM lets you differentiate between people who are "active", as in they are currently using FBM, vs. "last seen x hours ago." The difference from AIM is that being active vs. inactive does not necessarily correspond to whether or not you are up for an engaged conversation, and also that you don't directly control your status since it's automatic. There is also a way to set yourself to appear offline, though it's kinda convoluted. I 100% agree though that finer controls over your status like back in the good old days of AIM would be really nice.

It is not convoluted, just hidden. After you mention it I searched and it takes two clicks to get to. What it doesn't do is let you snoop. You are either active and see everyone who is active, or not active and don't see anyone who is active, a weird type of "fairness" that doesn't really make sense.

All these social networks are definitely trying to use symmetry to push for engagement, which is not always the goal from the user's perspective.

Why do you find the "fairness" not making sense? Seems to make sense to me. Telegram has the same feature for showing how many hours ago someone was active.

I think a large part on why Truecaller is so successful is because of the same model. It is slightly worse, as by default a user is visible.

I'm not doubting it, but in what way is Truecaller so successful? Never heard of it.

On top of that, I feel like many people view the chat as subservient to the main feature of Facebook (sharing and commenting on articles, pictures, and personal rants). The last few times I attempted to have conversations with people on Facebook chat, people seemed happy but somewhat surprised, chatted for a little bit, and then the conversation quickly died (and no attempt was made to revive it).