[rrreese]

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.

[paulryanrogers]

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.

[nextos]

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.

[kuschku]

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.

[mcpeepants]

Trillian was a fantastic piece of software

[sroussey]

So did iMessage back then.

[brandon272]

> 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.

[jedberg]

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).

[ljm]

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.

[mnutt]

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).

[xyst]

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.

[standardUser]

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.