No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing.

The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

Thank you. Let us not forget what general purpose computing was like.

Following up on this... I was Miranda user. With it I was able to run ICQ, MSN Messenger and other instant messengers with an encrypted layer slapped on top (as long as I was able to talk my friends out of using the official client). Today it's called Miranda NG[1] and it seems alive and kicking[2].

[1] https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/ [2] https://github.com/miranda-ng/miranda-ng

> you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

All Matrix homeservers and bridges are open source. I self host some of them myself. Have been doing that long before Element One was a thing.

How can I verify you're running unmodified, unhooked source in your server if I'm a user?

You don't, you self-host your own server.

My problem with the self-hosted model is that I don't trust myself to get it right and/or keep it updated. My problem with the 3rd-party model is that I don't trust them, either. So, lacking trust in either myself or the third-party, I'm just one of those people you can get only via secure e-mail, clear-text SMS, or whatever well-supported encrypted service happens to be the one with a plurality of users in my friend/family group. Clear-text sucks, but it can be used to negotiate a secure channel.

Unfortunately, the levels of spam in my traditional telephony services have dramatically increased in recent years, and as a tradeoff, I've just gotten harder and harder to get in touch with directly as I increasingly default to ignoring more and more methods of communication. I don't even think I'm someone with anything to hide or anything to fear my communications being in the public, there's just too much information to manage.

I feel the same way, I don't fully trust hosted solutions but don't completely trust myself to host my own -- which is where E2E encryption comes into play, but a malicious host would still have access to loads of metadata (timestamps, IPs, etc.).

Blockchain-based solutions like Status.im appear to do away with these sorts of issues through decentralization -- but you still have to put trust into their network.

Solutions like TLS & OMEMO over Tor for XMPP seem to be a very strong privacy-centered solution outside of blockchain-based applications.

I'm excited about NixOS (/GuixSD) because they would seem to provide a straightforward path to running secure services (self-compiled from publicly reviewable source) while keeping them automatically updated (build rules administered by a third party). I'm not saying this is a good approach for you personally right now, but I can definitely see it becoming popular in several years.

How can you verify what the latest update of Google Play Services is doing on your Android that's running a proprietary WhatsApp client just so you feel happy you have "E2E" encryption?

You can't. You can find a provider you trust or set them up yourself.

How can anyone verify that?

Reproducible builds. https://reproducible-builds.org/

Reproducible builds allow verifying that your build is correct by rebuilding it It doesn't help you verify that the server you're connected to is running the binary you've been given.

Why would I want a man in the middle of my communications?

Because the A-Series round of financiers think that's a great idea.

The real answer is because you want all your conversations to happen in the same app/protocol. You never have to download a shiny new messenger again

I'ved heard that pitch before. It's always true only for some length of time. Protocols change, services evolve, companies transform, products are deprecated and people are fickle.

I've used all-in-one messengers before. They come and go like the wind. You'll be downloading a shiny new all-in-one messenger periodically anyway.

Just trading one kind of inconvenience for another.

Perhaps if we normalized messenger interoperabiltiy, there would be less churn in "all-in-one" clients. That churn exists mostly because platforms actively fight their users on this.

And still, periodically changing an all-in-one messenger is still better than keeping and changing half a dozen messengers.

Unless those official clients have features not available in the all-in-one client. Like encryption, which this one apparently lacks.

The benefit of an all-in-one client is that they can port/shim/polyfill[0] missing features between the backing platforms.

--

[0] - Whatever is the most appropriate webdev word of the day.

And the downside of an all-in-one client is that they are going to have to port/shim/polyfill features from a hostile, proprietary, changing API.

Once again, the problem is not technical, it's political. Until interoperability is enforced by government, I expect companies to keep building their siloes. Network effect and tragic commons and all that.

It's worth remembering again why we don't do this. Even if you fully trust whoever is running the MITM server, being that it's MITMing all of your comms, and it's on a server so it's actually a lot of people's comms, it's a massively tempting target for all sorts of bad actors. Plenty of governments and criminal gangs would just love to compromise that for all sorts of reasons. Odds are one of them will eventually.

For all you know, someone else on the server is a high-value target for somebody, and if they compromise the server to get their comms, they may not be very picky about what happens to the private communications of everyone else on that server.

Can you run Pidgin on your phone and tablet and laptop and move between them?

Depends on the services you connect to.

Meebo was a service that did roughly the same thing as pidgin (leveraging libpurple to do so iirc). It's a shame it was turned down.

It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).

Pidgin doesn't use a "bridge"... it is just a generic local client that supports plugins for various protocols that are implemented via adversarial interoperability.

And because of that Pidgin is horribly unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, I used it for years, but over time all the plug-ins broke for one reason or another.

Law makers are required here to solve the situation, as platforms themselves refuse to work with each other. If Facebook and Google had to operate a common protocol (just like IMAP), Pidgin would work much better or wouldn't even be needed.

But no, they want to prevent people from talking with each other via other platforms because "we're best" or whatever.

It's probably because they don't want to lose users.

If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile?

The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.

Exactly! Providing a walled garden just for the sake of keeping users should not be legal, just like abusing any other market position wouldn't be legal.

I get that they want their "network effect" and keep it to themselves, but this is no good for users and the industry doesn't "regulate itself" as we've heard so many times, so time for law makers to step up finally.

My point is that the walled garden is the competitive advantage.

A law like this could regulate businesses out of existence.

Which websites fall under it? Only social? What about forums, etc. What if the companies just rebase to non-US jurisdictions? Even if you make this law, it's unlikely it would actually compel anyone to comply.

> A law like this could regulate businesses out of existence.

Only if they didn't change their business model to something less incredibly antisocial than walling people in and serving them ads.

There are many ways to operate a communications business on-line. That only the bad one is used in practice is a consequence of it being the most profitable of available options. If it weren't available (say, because of being regulated away), companies would pick the next most profitable one.

Yes — this line of argument sounds exactly like the people who very confidently said that the economy couldn’t survive ditching asbestos or CFCs, emissions laws would destroy California, etc.

The key part is having regulations apply the rules evenly so everyone prices it into their decisions. Trying to limit specific companies makes that feedback cycle less effective.

Yes, but what if this is the only way to have a profitable business such as these? Are you okay losing them entirely?

More generally, my view of regulation is that it should only exist if there is some quantifiable harm to an involuntary third party (negative externality). Where is the demonstrative harm here, and who is it impacting? Having one friend on FB and another on MySpace, requiring the user to log into each platform separately isn't harm. The effect is the same as having one friend call you on a phone to communicate and the other only use text.

Every single person using these platforms makes a conscious decision to use them given their limitations. Nobody is forcing anyone to use these platforms. The government still runs a post office. You could use that to communicate with people if you wanted.

Instead of passing legislation to fix your problem, how about you just talk to your friends and get them to agree on using a single platform?

> Yes, but what if this is the only way to have a profitable business such as these? Are you okay losing them entirely?

But it isn't. We know it isn't - exchanging text, audio and video messages wasn't invented by adtech giants. Two prime examples:

1) Telephony and mobile telephony operators have strong businesses to this day, despite being made interoperable by law.

2) Non-adtech e-mail providers exist and make money, despite being interoperable and not subsidized by advertising and personal data misuse.

> Where is the demonstrative harm here, and who is it impacting? Having one friend on FB and another on MySpace, requiring the user to log into each platform separately isn't harm.

In my opinion, there is harm - creating unnecessary burden and confusion for everyone, especially non-tech-savvy people. It is tying people down to services via network effects, and then further harming them by exfiltrating their personal data and exposing them to advertising (either directly or indirectly, making the ads more potent thanks to aforementioned personal information).

> The effect is the same as having one friend call you on a phone to communicate and the other only use text.

No, it isn't. It's just having one friend text you, another friend write you a Messenger message, yet another a WhatsApp message, yet another a Telegram message...

> Every single person using these platforms makes a conscious decision to use them given their limitations. Nobody is forcing anyone to use these platforms.

But that's not true at all. People are coerced to use these services, and coerced to stay with them. That's the literal definition of network effect. I have to use WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever because my mom is there and doesn't want yet another chat app, and my local plumber only communicates through it. I have to stay, because neither my mom nor my plumber will move. The more people are trapped in the net, the stronger its hold.

Contrast that with phone and e-mail service: I can communicate with anyone regardless of the provider they use. I don't even need to know what provider they use. And I can switch my providers at any time, and nobody else has to know, or care.

> Instead of passing legislation to fix your problem, how about you just talk to your friends and get them to agree on using a single platform?

These platforms are as successful as they are exactly because your proposed solution is impossible to implement by most people. Again: network effect.

WA works with a pure go-based bridge. No Android required.

The rest of your comment is true though. Keeping these bridges up 24/7 is quite a bit of work. Most people (even technical ones) probably won’t bother with that.

You need WhatsApp to be installed on a real device or a VM for mautrix-whatapp [1] (the bridge) to work. You also need to connect to that real device using WhatsApp web [2].

I know because I've used the bridge.

[1] https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp [2] https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/authentication.html

Which bridge is it? Mautrix/whatsapp does require an Android instance of whatsapp.

Nah. You can pair it up to an real WhatsApp-account using your phone and from there on, it’s go-code only.

It is not a service, if it's a link to a download and a bunch of community-developed plugins.

When you take away the motivation to mitm all of the users' chats, there's nothing left.

And FB will probably not like running WA in an emulator, and will kill that option as soon as it reaches ~100k users.

how can they kill it?

They have so much money and influence, I trust them to find a way :)

With enough motivation, competitors can reverse their efforts. Reversing (competitors' job) is finding just only one flaw in a system. Hardening (WhatsApp's job) is thinking about all the possible ways it could be flawed. It can be an endless cat and mouse game though I guess.

Of course the protocols Pidgin bridged were only used for real-time communication, rather than for leaving messages which could be attended to (or delivered) later.

No, it wasn't. Yahoo had offline messages. So did many of its other protocols.

Ah you're right, I think I indeed had that for MSN as well. Must've gotten confused.

> I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way?

I used Pidgin a lot. I always found it very convenient to have everything in one place and UI. Better one client than MSN + AOL + ICQ + IRC + Yahoo! + XMPP.

In the last few years I haven't used it much, but that's because it just doesn't support the popular messaging apps of the day (or maybe it now does, I haven't checked in a while).

Also, as others have pointed out, Pidgin is not and never has been a "service", it's just a library (libpurple) that implements various protocols, with Pidgin as the GUI (they also make Finch, a TUI).

Pidgin was extremely convenient. But it was commoditizing messaging platforms so of course it had to be shot in the head by them.

I don't think anything got "shot in the end"; the protocols of old were often just reverse-engineered too. Few bothered publishing anything about it, which is why Jabber/XMPP was created.

Since then encryption made things a lot harder; specifically, E2E encryption. You can't "just" login to a server and send messages, you need to encrypt and decrypt things on the device with the right keys, and how do you handle things like message history WhatsApp and Signal solve this for the desktop/web versions by designating your phone as the only device that can connect to their service, and everything else communicates via that phone. Telegram solves it by having regular chats not be E2E encrypted, and having a special "secret chat" feature for it.

That's not 100% accurate. Signal handles message history per device. If you link a new device, you can only see messages that were sent/received after that. There is no way to sync messages between devices, they all get the messages from the signal servers directly. This also means that you can use signal on linked devices if your phone is offline; you just need the phone for initial sign-on.

who's them?

> messaging platforms

No need to pretend that what the previous comment was saying is some kind of conspiracy when it's obvious that business gonna business.

oof

Bitlbee can optionally use Libpurple too.

I thought about all that libpurple did back then, including OTR encryption that worked perfectly fine with others.

These days I think that most services try to make money with stuff that was built decades ago already, and they're just keeping the reinventing cycle spinning.

Anyone remember the franz app [1] ...which finally led to the hardfork of ferdi? [2] I feel that element one is franz all over again.

[1] https://meetfranz.com

[2] https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

Franz was mainly just web views, no? Ferdi appears to be the same. This is different.

> Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols

It was not a not a service which was always on and synced between units.

It was a client you had to run on your machine and keep connected. And it obviously didn’t roam.

Pretty much an apples to oranges comparison.

Matrix and Element aims to bring all those things you mention to a single protocol, to which you can connect any client you like, on any device you like, and roam as you like with all your clients always in sync.

It’s what Pidgin used to deliver, levelled up and connected to the “modern” (read: closed) IM-silos the majority of people are using.

It’s definitely different and it’s definitely interesting.

Back in the day and for a little while platforms companies thought to at least have a common language (xmpp). Then they thought it would be a better idea if we all had 10 different apps on our phones for text messages.

There's no reason for standardization and interoperability not to be forced on these companies.

When you sent a physical letter you have to follow some standards on the envelope addresses, when you make a phone call to the other side of the world people can still hear your voice, same for sms, same for email, but apparently sending a string of text via internet in a standard protocol is an unsolvable problem.

Companies must be forced to implement a subset of their features as part of some interoperability standard. The rest they can keep for their competitive advantage. I can't recall any industry who ever volunteered for this. Car makers didn't, telecoms didn't, software makers won't. No one did and they all exploited their users/customers to the fullest until they were forced to do so.

think about this: WA protocol was simply XMPP with shorter labels (one character when possible)

Anyone remember Trillian? I used to use it to combine Facebook Messenger, ICQ, and some other stuff.

All my friends have since moved to Discord now which is way nicer than any other user experience.

Yep, brings be back... + AIM, MSN, they even had a primitive IRC connection if memory serves me right.

> While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is.

I'm unclear if it supports relay mode, but if so, you can invite Matrix, Signal, and WhatsApp users into the same group chat! [1] Edit: Relay mode is not currently supported in Element One, I tried it out. I contacted support and they said "we will discuss this internally and possibly enabled it later"

I've been using this on my self-hosted version of the bridge and it does wonders for those friends who are on Signal but don't want to try another app.

Also, a lot of people just don't want to swap between apps for direct messaging people on different services. This means you can use any Matrix compatible app [2] to chat with anyone on Matrix/WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram.

[1]: https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/python/s...

[2]: https://matrix.org/clients/

The Glory days, when both Google Talk and Facebook used XMPP, and you can run one client to chat with all of them. We ran Prosidy and Pidgin at my old job, and it worked great for our company chat server.

Facebook group chats were xmpp too? I thought they never were

I think this is more like XMPP transports in that is is centralized at the server. Such things tended to end up centralized as it is a lot of work to keep up with the efforts of the people running the services to remain incompatible with the bridges. These days few XMPP servers bother with transports to commercial IM services. I suspect the same thing will happen in the Matrix case.

Transports work against your platform. Running a WhatsApp transport, you enhance WhatsApp's network effect and dilute your own.

Transports work for you when you're an upstart, because it makes it less risky for users to adopt your platform. They work against you only once you get significant market share.

See e.g. Slack, which propelled itself to success by offering an IRC transport, which prevented strong opposition for technically inclined people, and then promptly killing it when they became a major player in the office IM space.

Two decades ago I used trillian and mirianda for all the popular messaging protocols,

https://trillian.im/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/

Now there is another open source alternative: Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge) connecting: Mattermost, IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Rocketchat, Twitch, SSH-chat, Zulip, WhatsApp, Keybase, Matrix, Microsoft Teams, NextCloud, Mumble, VK and more.

The use case is simple: instead of using plethora of IM apps, have all your conversations in one place.

Wow, this seems better than ElementOne?

Agreed, not sure what the use case is. It’s super trivial to switch between messaging apps and it’s not often that you are having a conversation with multiple people over multiple apps at once and even then it’s still manageable.

The only thing I can think of is people who do not wish to have the app installed for privacy / open source reasons.

Think of people who are:

- Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around.

- People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden.

- Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices.

- People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all those clients together and each individually, and who'd prefer a single, consistent, ergonomic and powerful UI to manage the torrent of messages they receive.

The first two are not well solved by Matrix as the default client is far less user friendly than the proprietary alternatives.

Storage space might be an issue on very low end phones but these days phones are starting with 128gb of storage which no IM app is close to filling. Mobile OSs are extremely good at sleeping apps and can receive messages while the app is not running at all using notification services. I would say that resource bloat is actually much more of an issue on desktop where you have 10 instances of chrome running and none can be closed while still receiving notifications.

There was a good recent episode of Late Night Linux Extra[0] where the maintainer talks about Pidgin and how it compares with Matrix.

[0] https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32...

I really love libpurple plugins for pidgin and how they can be combined.

For example, I was able to communicate using OTR on vk.com (russian facebook clone). Probably other niche messaging plugins work with OTR too (it's just plaintext messages, after all).

There, it's still good:

https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

I’d use the f out of this… if this was easy to setup. I’d like that but with one click and some settings things to sign.

Pidgin is an IM client, not a service. A service would be something like XMPP servers (Google Talk used to be one and even federated until it went sideways).

Pidgin? Pffff! That’s some casual stuff right there.

Real Scotsmen used bitlbee and irssi to enable their IRC addiction, long after everyone else had moved on to harder stuff.

:)

Pidgin works with a surprising number of modern services [0]. I used it last year on my 32 bit computer that couldn’t run the official discord client.

Fun fact, pidgin was developed by Mark Spencer, who also wrote Asterisk PBX and currently builds open source flight avionics.

Ah, XMPP + OTR. Brings back fond memories.

I think Trillian was even older, and I think there were some KDE apps that did it even before that...

Kopete

https://apps.kde.org/kopete/

I still use pidgin regularly for various chat rooms and ircs etc. It is a great piece of kit imo

Pidgin and Gajim.

Everything old is new again.