I remember the good old days, when I had one client to talk to my friends, no matter which service they were on. The services themselves were a commodity, which I guess is exactly why this is no longer the case.

It also wasn't difficult to set up your own server and bring your own domain, resulting in an easy to remember vanity handle like [email protected]. I hosted both prosody and ejabberd for years for friends and family, and it was orders of magnitude easier than self-hosting a mail server. Sadly, eventually everyone moved to proprietary platforms because file sending worked badly in those days, and mobile XMPP clients were simply terrible (no push notifications and such).

This is why I use my Matrix bridges. XMPP has bridges too, of course (that's where the Matrix bridges were inspired by) but it seems the "up and coming" status of Matrix helps the bridges be maintained better.

FWIW, the EU has passed the Digital Markers Act which requires big tech companies to open up their platform. It'll take a while before it takes effect, but unless Apple, Google, Meta and all others are going the very expensive "fine me and we'll see what happens" route, we should soon see movement towards an environment where different apps can talk to each other again.

The tech industry being what it is, there is no real standard for interoperability yet, though there is an IETF taskforce working on setting up a standard companies may follow: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/

This, critically, considers encrypted messages in a standard way so that we don't lose E2EE in the process.

Let's hope this ends up being good, I can see it taking twenty years and at some point standardizing a backend into the encryption :(

I really despise having 18 proprietary chat apps.

Alternative are cropping up. I've been testing out solutions with other nerds.

https://www.beeper.com/ is promising. It's set of matrix bridge over 15 chat network or so.

Neat.

I've been successfully using their iMessage bridge for my personal server for about a year now. It's very nice to use iMessage on my Linux machines, since that's the chat network everyone around me has decided to use.

Is this in accordance with those services’ TOS? How can you be sure you won’t get banned?

For instance, I remember hearing that Discord banned users who used alternative clients.

Good point. From my pov they can then shove their service up their ass but it’s a valid concern.

20 feels like an exaggeration, but there are more than 20 Matrix bridges, so maybe I'm just less spread out than some. I've been using Telegram, Signal, Google Chat, and Discord so far, on a self-hosted server. It's not too hard to stand up, especially if you hang around here, and works a treat. Highly recommend if you want one app to message everyone from.

+1 I just set up a Matrix homeserver for the first time, and it was really slick with the Ansible playbook.

I am astonished by how well the Signal bridge works — everything works! Read indicators, threads, mentions, groups…so far I have it configured as a linked device to my phone, but you can also configure it as your primary device.

I really want to use the WhatsApp bridge, but that seems messier. I don’t want to install WhatsApp on my phone, so it requires running Android in a VM with a VoIP number, and apparnetly risks getting banned from WhatsApp.