Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps π«€
Memes
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn't have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
Just never interact with anyone. Christ, it's not that hard people! (This comment doesn't count.)
We're all bots. You still haven't interacted with a person.
i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can't download iChat.
Wait, do you guys have friends?
Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now
I have a friend that will only chat with me on Instagram. I have his number, but he will never respond to text. He only engages in insta, itβs mildly infuriating.
if you won't talk to me except through insta then you're not worth being friends with just fucking text me like a normal ass human.
Remember E-Mail, everyone?
A lot of people around me are genuinely confused when your email is not firstname.lastname@gmail.com
, as they mostly just use it for confirming logins. That's how bad the situation is.
Just stop using the spyware ones?
That leaves you with element, signal and telegram?
Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they've already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with "the most backdoor looking bug" with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
We need a new Trillian or Adium. Fucking anti-interop gatekeepers.
Let's just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern "chat" landscape is dismal.
I really miss how windows phone allowed other chat services to plug in to it, so that you could have a single chat app for all your contacts, but open the individual apps for advanced features.
I remember when WebOS had unified messaging. Those were the days. π΄
I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just... boring.
Wdym "boring", what do you want a messenger app to do? It does what it's there for and it does it well.
Matrix with bridges can help consolidate them. Some managed versions exist like Beeper and Element. Been slowly moving to that. Will eventually self host.
Yeah... This 1000 times... It DOES bother me to install all that shit. What doesn't bother me? Installing a bridge on Matrix and having everything in one place. Hell I've even started adding matrix to my linux scripts. I get notifications about script status in dedicated spaces on my single chat window.
I'm literally SMS away from doing 100% of the chat clients I use for personal usage... And seriously debating on bridging teams for work usage.
I've even gotten my wife onboard. That, to me, speaks about how frustrated normal people are with having many different apps as well.
Don't have friends. Problem solved.
Literally me.. I've 5/7 of these installed and even have Threema in addition. I don't need more than one Meta Inc product in my life though
Element has bridges to some of the services
Too much relatable
What is the middle one?
Element. It's a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.
Which funnily enough, has bridges to Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram and some more, meaning you wouldn't have to have as many other clients installed to chat with contacts on those platforms
I remember looking into that a while ago, but it's not like I can just instantly hook up my WhatsApp or Telegram account into that, right? I'd need a server to act as a bridge.
And I wouldn't be so keen on giving that kind of access to a random server.