See this page for a list of all the third party protocol support https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text in a single message is just... How did everyone involved decide that it's reasonable? Did people design the UX on top of a protocol when it should always be done the other way around?
The main issue I'm having with every single of the modern IM apps is that they combine the chat list and the chat switcher into a single control. It's part of the overall unfortunate trend of touchscreen-ification of desktop UIs. Tabbed chat windows need to make a comeback, yesterday.
We're not really moving forward with the proprietary chat protocols (Slack, Teams, Whatsapp). It is a much, much harder problem to solve than MSN and Yahoo ever was.
Slack was definitely a major blow. I used Campfire at work but we still had to use other services, usually gChat, to message privately. When we migrated to Slack in 2014 or whatever, we now had a service that allowed private messaging AND had mobile apps too — something that the old era of the Adium/Pidgin/Trillian’s never quite executed on (I know there were mobile AIM and gChat clients back in the day; I had AIM on my SideKick in high school and a number of decentish apps on iOS even, but those protocols just weren’t ever designed or well-adapted/executed to push messaging a la BBM or iMessage or SMS the way it needed to be — largely thanks to the wireless carriers who wanted to keep a hold of that pure profit SMS for as long as possible.) We had mobile-first/mobile-only services like WhatsApp (which immediately took off outside the US) and the GroupMe’s had some success too, but those services were slow to support (if they ever did) XMPP or other bridges to get them working on desktop), so Slack was a nice unifier.
I loved Adium for so long. I even had a Slack bridge I think in it at some point. But I had to finally let it go and remove it from my dock.
I pay for Beeper today, but I don’t use it as much as I would like. But it remains one of the better ways for me to recreate the world I had 10 and 15 years ago.
I didn’t take it for granted because I had already been using the prior iteration of incompatible chat apps soup, and I clung to it far longer than most reasonable people would as it became a ghost town on supported protocols.
The biggest exodus at the time (from my perspective) was when Google closed up whatever their current branded chat service was. But the real nail in the coffin (again from my perspective) was Slack, for the fairly obvious reasons that chat is their primary product and active/paying users is their primary product. Of course the rise of other chat-first apps successful with the youngs, and well positioned instant incumbents from social media, the coffin had many nails.
But it really is a shame this era came to an end. I don’t know how it could have gone differently given the incentives and circumstances, but I’d go back to those tradeoffs (basically everything works in one native app where I can talk to anyone I know however I want to, but probably direct file transfers are gonna fail most of the time) in a heartbeat.