[Braini]

That is correct but it was still more open than what we have now with the current services. 3rd party clients and multi-protocol messengers we don't have at all anymore.

[blfr]

Isn't that what Beeper or Ferdium are doing? And there's still libpurple/Pidgin.

[1] https://www.beeper.com/

[2] https://ferdium.org/

[Braini]

Interesting, need to check but so far the modern methods of multi protocol messaging was mostly just aggregating the web UIs of the various services in a single application (read: like a web browser)

Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.