[philjw]

Just set-up a linux machine with Pidgin Messenger and XMPP last week like in the old days.

It used to bundle MSN, ICQ, IRC and everything in one messenger - super resource efficient.

Unfortulately I cannot reach many contacts that way these days but it showed me how inefficient applications became by using more abstraction layers.

Same on my Mac - it uses almost 16GB of RAM in idle mode with some Tabs, VSCode and Figma open - How did we get here?

edit: Just saw another comment mentioning there is a WhatsApp plugin for Pidgin. Awesome!