I’m baffled as to when this time was? Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget).

Before the there there the proprietary networks (Aol, CompuServe and others) along with BBS, IRC, Newsgroups, etc.

I literally don’t remember a time in my life where messaging hasn’t been fragmented.

> Back in the day there was ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger (and no doubt a dozen I forget).

Yes, and you could combine them all into a single multi-protocol messaging app like Adium, Trillian, Gaim, Pidgin, etc. to provide a single convenient unified experience.

A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete.

Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.

This was a great time, and I indeed miss XMPP, with proper federation to lots of different servers, including Google Talk, and Jingle videocalls!

Modern XMPP is really great, Conversations is a fantastic client, supports E2E encryption, is open source, and makes minimal use of resources.

But there's nobody on it :(

Trillian was a fantastic piece of software

So did iMessage back then.

That's precisely what the primary Beeper Cloud and the old Element One product are for. Just connect to your Signal, Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage accounts and chat with all of them in one single app.

Beeper Cloud and Element One do this through matrix bridges, but Beeper has been trying to move this entirely into the client again, which is what Beeper Mini is an experiment for.

If Beeper Mini succeeds, it'll soon also support Signal, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. If Apple succeeds, messaging will remain fragmented.

2001, when Adium launched. It pretty much had every messaging app that anyone was on.

I used it exclusively for years. It supported all those things (or I should say if someone had multiple ways to get to them, Adium supported at least one of them).

Adium was a total lifesaver on Mac since there was never an official MSN messenger client there.

Back then a lot of services also used XMPP but that has been readily abandoned - Slack used to do XMPP, doesn't any more. Google used to do XMPP, doesn't any more...

I suppose one reason for it is E2E encryption.

That's also possible with XMPP and Matrix. They just liked to get away with closing their fences

I think their switch away from XMPP predates E2EE and some of them still aren't using E2EE, so that's not the real reason. XMPP has good E2EE now with OMEMO though.

> since there was never an official MSN messenger client there.

There certainly was: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1

Adium was a very well-designed mac app that I used for many years. All of its messaging connectivity was due to its use of libpurple (formerly libgaim).

Yes, and there was Trillian, which was compatible with all of ICQ, Yahoo Chat, MSN Messenger and others.

But because Apple decided to make their messaging system a marketing tool instead of an interoperable app, we don't get to have a Trillian equivalent today.

Probably when e-mail was the primary form of digital communication.

Or maybe referring to RL. You know, actually talking to someone on phone or in-person. Although then you have to deal with different accents, dialects, languages, and even regions specific lexicon.

It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. In sympathetic to the fragmentation take honestly, apple doesn't stop you from installing Whatsapp, but it's an interesting situation where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed

> It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread.

They are both issues! Fragmentation in messaging is a real problem in the US, and iMessage has for a decade been the closest to a solution for iPhone users. Users' frustration with fragmentation pushes them into the app where 1) they know the message will get there, and 2) there's a 50% chance the experience won't suck. iMessage's existence in a fragmented market and refusal to interoperate all but guarantees the fragmentation will continue.

> where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed

The folks complaining are a vocal minority of Android users. Everyone else doesn't care.

IIRC that is the original goal of beeper, to act as a universal messenger front end

So the end result will be dozens of 'universal' 'standards'?

If clients supporting multiple protocols become popular they could default to a sensible open protocol. Which, as the default in the popular app(s), would become the most widely used protocol. People can switch at their leisure because the app supports both, but over time the users transition because it's the default.

Since the old and proprietary protocols are only sustained by the network effect, they lose users, and eventually support for them gets dropped.

It's a method of transitioning from a collection of proprietary systems with their own network effects to an open one, by temporarily supporting both. For obvious reasons the operators of the proprietary systems don't want to be subject to that competition, which is they same reason they shouldn't be allowed to shut it out.

I think in the end, whoever chooses to block these apps(Trillian, Pidgin, etc) too hard will be the ones left in the dust.

Evidently that isn't the case.

yet

They are using Matrix. You can use any Matrix client to interact with Beeper's services.

A client that can interop with multiple services isn't adding a new standard.

The end result will likely be a few apps that do the legwork to beat the various messaging platforms into some common denominator feature set and give you a single pane of glass.

Unsiloing messaging isn't some quick fix. It would be like saying "we have all these forums like HN, Reddit, Twitter, SpaceHey, Facebook they should all share a global identity system and be able to be used all by a single app with the same APIs." Like we can't even make a generic ActivityPub client.

Pidgin supports a good number of chat clients :) They lost the battle for a while there when walled gardens went up, but then won later on and regained support.

https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=

No iMessage, of course, but you might find it helpful to see the list of supported clients.

apple did the "embrace, extend, extinguish" with this.

the original apple messages app did AOL messenger and others.

then it gradually forced you off of them into imessage.

The main services iChat supported - AIM and Yahoo Messenger are gone. Google Chat no longer supports XMPP. I don't know anything about Facebook Messenger. Increasingly messaging services became siloed.

Whoa there can you put a trigger warning before posting about ki___ng hu__ns? Some people are very sensitive about that sort of speech

Wth are you talking about? My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness, which you seem quite eager to hit on. I guess i'm not used to this kind of americanization of the debate and i must've said something very wrong to say without realizing. Point is the phrase is completely excessive in this context, we're talking about exchanging text messages. Yes aim and gtalk was funny but there is some romanticizing about "the old web".

>My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness

Yes it did. Here it is, reproduced:

>Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.

In this comment, you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. Your comment could be replaced with "adium good" and it would retain all its utility. Yet, you felt it was necessary to police the language of someone else using a benign and commonplace term ("Balkanized") because it offended your particular sensibilities.

Welcome to the internet. People say things you disagree with regularly. If the term Balkanized offends you, please do not visit 4chan, reddit, twitter, or mastodon.

Your comment quoted above is of the absolute lowest quality, adds nothing to the conversation, and serves only to drag the quality of conversation down into the muck where the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.

Thanks for lecturing me about the web. As is pretty evident in this subthread, there are definitely people here on hn that seem to be overly sensitive to self-proclaimed policing. Once again one last time: my response was calling the parent hyperbolic and actually imprecise. I couldn't have provoked this kind of reaction had i wanted to. TIL

> the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.

Just wow. Which would be who exactly in this subthread? The amount of fact reversal to get to this conclusion is quite amazing.

I think that's essentially their point. The root of the term "balkanized" is war and the person they're replying to could have used a word with less violent connotations like the ones listed.

FYI "TW" is outdated language and shouldn't be used any more. The phrase can elicit stress about what's to follow, and the t-word is associated with violent imagery.

Imagery is problematic, it is an aggression to put a picture into another person’s head without informed consent