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A comment on I patched my Slack client to keep “oops” messages others delete. Parent comment

Re:I patched my Slack client to keep “oops” messages others ... by jeromegv on Monday September 05, 2022 @10:43PM (#32732115)
aMSN had this feature because the MSN protocol would establish a connection as soon as a you opened a chat window (before you started typing!) in order to be able to retrieve the display picture from the other user. So you would be able to know that someone opened a chat window but decided against starting to type (or haven't decided quite yet they would want to type).

This is documented in this old FAQ https://github.com/Kjir/amsn/blob/master/amsn/FAQ

(Former aMSN developer)

I admit now this is creepy.

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Re:I patched my Slack client to keep “oops” messages others ... by shultays on Monday September 05, 2022 @10:49PM (#32732176)
Huh, was msn fetching the profile picture from other perso (p2p?), and not from msn servers?
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Re:I patched my Slack client to keep “oops” messages others ... by GekkePrutser on Monday September 05, 2022 @11:56PM (#32732640)
It was early days for IM and I guess storage was expensive.

Early ICQ didn't even store the contact list on the server so you had different contacts on every PC.

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