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There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative.

There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its the worst chat app ever that kills your battery instantly. There are others as well but enough is enough. How did we get here? I regularly need to think where should I message someone or where is a specific chat group.... Imagine you had to do this for every email service provider.

Freak_NL 9y ago
Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.
- jhasse 9y ago
  A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties. Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.
    - dmytroi 9y ago
      Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se https://hitta.se
      - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        Yes, what I meant to say is that the SIM card is tied to exactly one telco at any particular time. It's also tied to one device at a time. Perhaps one of the virtual SIM card offerings would work with Signal though. I'm juggling too many SIM cards and phones already. I don't want any new dependencies that complicate matters further.
        LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        You only need the sim card active to activate your signal with that number. After that you don't have to be connected to a cell network at all.
        fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        But I still need to keep the SIM card active or I could never switch phones (or reinstall the phone OS) without losing my Signal identity. I cannot ever let go of the phone number I used to activate Signal. In practice, that means I need to keep paying for a phone tariff I may no longer want.
        LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        True. I was assuming most people have at least one phone number they want to keep long term (even if it's not always active with their cell). Note though that signal will also work fine with non-traditional services that provide free or much cheaper phone numbers like google voice (US), skype, or twilio. It is true though that you do need to maintain a phone number. That is one of the trade-offs they made to allow it to actually be usable. I have not seen a better solution for encrypted communication yet.
        fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        How does the phone number tie-in make it usable? Phone numbers and SIM cards are about the most user hostile thing I can possibly think of. What's wrong with the way Threema does it for instance, which is essentially to bind the identity to a key pair that you can back up?
    - jhasse 9y ago
      No, you can change the number associated with your Telegram account.
      - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        I was talking about Signal. Sorry I didn't make that clear. The phone number is your identity. Changing it means reregistering with a different number. [Edit] And I think it's essentially the same with WhatsApp, only they now make it a less manual process.
        jhasse 9y ago
        Ah, I should have mentioned that I was talking about Telegram in my original comment, too. Can't edit it anymore :/
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    You do need one to set it up, right? I had to scan a QR code displayed on my desktop with my phone. (I could continue to use the desktop app while my phone was being repaired, though, which was great.)
    - jhasse 9y ago
      No, you can do the complete setup with the Telegram desktop app, but you need a device which can receive SMS or a phone call.
      - Vinnl 9y ago
        Oh hmm, looks like I got tangled in the threads - I thought we were discussing Signal. My bad!
        jhasse 9y ago
        Ah I see ;) Yeah the QR code scanning sounded like Signal / WhatsApp, never heard of that method in a Telegram app.
  - notzorbo3 9y ago
    > A smartphone isnt required It is for Whatsapp. Not only for sign-up, but actually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. The web "session" times out constantly, so I'd have to re-pair it with my phone all the time. If I still decided to use whatsapp.
    - exikyut 9y ago
      > [A]ctually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. How on earth does that work? Say my phone's on data, my laptop's on my home wifi with NAT. How does Whatsapp on the web reach my phone?
      - tiagoespinha 9y ago
        Your phone connects to WhatsApp's servers. So does your laptop. The bridging is likely done server-side. I assume this is done because WhatsApp is (probably) using end-to-end encryption, so everything must be ran by your phone (which is the only place where your private key is stored) in order to encrypt the messages.
        JosephRedfern 9y ago
        It works impressively well, though -- I use it far more than I do the mobile client directly.
    - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
      To be really pedantic; a smartphone is not required for WhatsApp. You can activate a Google voice number with a landline, then use your Google voice number to activate WhatsApp running in BlueStacks or your emulator of choice. Source: I did this for a few months. I'm not quite sure why...
      - philtar 9y ago
        A smartphone OS is required for whatsapp
  - ossguy 9y ago
    In these cases you could use a https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ phone number. No smartphone is required for JMP, only an XMPP client (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 for some client options).
    - jhasse 9y ago
      A smartphone isn't required for Telegram either.
  - TheKarateKid 9y ago
    Incorrect. Whatsapp refuses to open on my iPad and isn't even available in the App Store. The only reason it got on there was a glitch in Apple's app sync which must've auto-downloaded it since I have it on my iPhone.
    - jhasse 9y ago
      Sorry, I was talking about Telegram. Should have made that more clear.
- tyfon 9y ago
  I'm using Signal on my linux desktop right now. It appears to be a packaged webpage but it works fine and is linked to my phone and laptop. All it require is a phone number, besides it's Snowden approved :)
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    You're using signal in a browser on your linux desktop. Poke me when there's any way to connect via bitlbee or libpurple, like there is for ICQ, jabber, etc.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    They lose all credibility when they force you to reveal your phone number. Doesn't matter who endorses it.
    - LamaOfRuin 9y ago
      They are entirely honest about their trade-offs. While those trade-offs may be deal-breakers for you, it should bolster their credibility.
- balladeer 9y ago
  I had signed up for Telegram on a phone, so can't say whether you can sign up w/o a phone (I think it would require SMS verification). It doesn't need you to be logged in on any phone however. You can use just the desktop app. In fact I am on some really crowded and hyperactive Telegram groups so can't even imagine keeping it on my phone. Besides not a single one of my IRL friends use Telegram. I see 3-4 names, maybe they had signed up once.
- petre 9y ago
  Wire doesn't. It uses the same protocol as Signal, has mobile, desktop and web apps and the source is on Github.
whateveruser 9y ago
Perhaps try Skype lite? It has almost zero bloat, and has been working flawlessly for all my needs.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  It that like the Facebook Lite app that's geofenced to emerging countries? How bloated an app has to be to make a company with the size of M$ to create an alternative client?
  - Y_Y 9y ago
    I (relatively) happily use the Facebook Lite app in Ireland where I got it from Play Store. I'm not sure we're emerging from anything.
- jackson1way 9y ago
  "Introducing Skype Lite Built for India - Chat and share with friends." it appears to exist only for Android phones. It's nothing but a joke that you'd have to switch to a "lite" version that is built explicitly for India [because of bad infrastructure] just to make it work in a country with much better infrastructure. It's like buying a low-end car built for Indian market, because your regular car doesn't fit on the narrow roads in the US, the fuel consumption is too high, it leaks oil constantly and there is no service because nobody cares.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    This is a worthless analogy, because some software is paired down and is "built for india" it sucks? A paired down debloated skype sounds like a godsend to me.
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      ...that's not what they were saying at all. The insults were being heaped on the 'normal' skype. And skype lite is definitely lacking in configuration, like the ability to make emoticons less annoying. (I've also switched to skype lite for the remaining two chats I'm in that use skype, now that the slightly-older android version stopped connecting and the newest interface is amazingly painful and laggy.)
tiagoespinha 9y ago
> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. To me it feels like the open standards never really kept up with the times, which in a way paved the way to walled gardens by the giants (and, in case of Slack, not so giants) to fill the gap which the open standards refused to fill. I mean, sure IRC is awesome, text-only, channels, but emojis are limited to ASCII, inline GIFs are non-existent, and file-sharing (and/or storage) is rather clunky from what I remember from the old times. And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling (or at least it didn't last time I checked) and it's not very surprising that companies just capitalize on that and make their own platforms. Don't take me wrong though... it creeps me out how the company where I work trusts Slack with reams and reams of confidential documents, but I guess it's convenient to an extent which no other platform is.
- cornholio 9y ago
  > And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler problem than email spam. I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players (Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc.) at least at text chat level.
  - nextos 9y ago
    XMPP is a bit complex, and suffers from some problems derived from too much flexibility. The mandatory part of the protocol is too small. This could be fixed by creating a meta XEP that lists all XEPs needed by modern clients. However, it's a very capable protocol. Just see how nice conversations.im is. It doesn't even use GCM, and both latency and energy usage are fantastic.
    - ossguy 9y ago
tandav 9y ago
There're thousands of companies in Russia using Telegram as main communication tool.
hota_mazi 9y ago
> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol. It's all about product design and user interface.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And the more i read about Slack the less i want to touch it. Emoji, gifs, fuck off.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  And the failing of the walled gardens is that you can't choose the product design and user interface you want and use it to talk to everyone.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  Slack provides IRC relay, which initially was almost feature complete, but got out of date with time. Anyway, in some time Slack will probably fade away as quickly as it appeared, further contributing to the problem grandparent noticed and you seem to misunderstand.
luka-birsa 9y ago
I'd just like to add that one of the key things I love about the current crypto craze is the fact that it gives us something that never existed before - the capability to monetize protocols. I know that most ICOs will fail, but through this process we might get something that solves this shitty situation with chat applications.

Freak_NL 9y ago

Signal and WhatsApp require a smartphone though, so not fully cross platform, and tied to their (closed) client software. Not sure if Telegram requires a smartphone too, but it does seem to require a phone number at least.

jhasse 9y ago
A smartphone isnt required, only a telephone number for authentification.
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  The problem is that you need to own that same phone number permanently. Phone numbers are tied to exactly one SIM card, which is tied to exactly one telco in one country. Too many ties. Threema doesn't require a phone number but it's not free.
  - dmytroi 9y ago
    Depends on a country, in Sweden you can move your mobile number to any telco, and anyone can look up your number and your home address using something like [0]. But yes, it is still tied to a country. - [0] https://hitta.se https://hitta.se
    - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
      Yes, what I meant to say is that the SIM card is tied to exactly one telco at any particular time. It's also tied to one device at a time. Perhaps one of the virtual SIM card offerings would work with Signal though. I'm juggling too many SIM cards and phones already. I don't want any new dependencies that complicate matters further.
      - LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        You only need the sim card active to activate your signal with that number. After that you don't have to be connected to a cell network at all.
        fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        But I still need to keep the SIM card active or I could never switch phones (or reinstall the phone OS) without losing my Signal identity. I cannot ever let go of the phone number I used to activate Signal. In practice, that means I need to keep paying for a phone tariff I may no longer want.
        LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        True. I was assuming most people have at least one phone number they want to keep long term (even if it's not always active with their cell). Note though that signal will also work fine with non-traditional services that provide free or much cheaper phone numbers like google voice (US), skype, or twilio. It is true though that you do need to maintain a phone number. That is one of the trade-offs they made to allow it to actually be usable. I have not seen a better solution for encrypted communication yet.
        fauigerzigerk 9y ago
        How does the phone number tie-in make it usable? Phone numbers and SIM cards are about the most user hostile thing I can possibly think of. What's wrong with the way Threema does it for instance, which is essentially to bind the identity to a key pair that you can back up?
  - jhasse 9y ago
    No, you can change the number associated with your Telegram account.
    - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
      I was talking about Signal. Sorry I didn't make that clear. The phone number is your identity. Changing it means reregistering with a different number. [Edit] And I think it's essentially the same with WhatsApp, only they now make it a less manual process.
      - jhasse 9y ago
        Ah, I should have mentioned that I was talking about Telegram in my original comment, too. Can't edit it anymore :/
- Vinnl 9y ago
  You do need one to set it up, right? I had to scan a QR code displayed on my desktop with my phone. (I could continue to use the desktop app while my phone was being repaired, though, which was great.)
  - jhasse 9y ago
    No, you can do the complete setup with the Telegram desktop app, but you need a device which can receive SMS or a phone call.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Oh hmm, looks like I got tangled in the threads - I thought we were discussing Signal. My bad!
      - jhasse 9y ago
        Ah I see ;) Yeah the QR code scanning sounded like Signal / WhatsApp, never heard of that method in a Telegram app.
- notzorbo3 9y ago
  > A smartphone isnt required It is for Whatsapp. Not only for sign-up, but actually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. The web "session" times out constantly, so I'd have to re-pair it with my phone all the time. If I still decided to use whatsapp.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    > [A]ctually all communication on the web version goes through the app running on your phone. How on earth does that work? Say my phone's on data, my laptop's on my home wifi with NAT. How does Whatsapp on the web reach my phone?
    - tiagoespinha 9y ago
      Your phone connects to WhatsApp's servers. So does your laptop. The bridging is likely done server-side. I assume this is done because WhatsApp is (probably) using end-to-end encryption, so everything must be ran by your phone (which is the only place where your private key is stored) in order to encrypt the messages.
      - JosephRedfern 9y ago
        It works impressively well, though -- I use it far more than I do the mobile client directly.
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    To be really pedantic; a smartphone is not required for WhatsApp. You can activate a Google voice number with a landline, then use your Google voice number to activate WhatsApp running in BlueStacks or your emulator of choice. Source: I did this for a few months. I'm not quite sure why...
    - philtar 9y ago
      A smartphone OS is required for whatsapp
- ossguy 9y ago
  In these cases you could use a https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ phone number. No smartphone is required for JMP, only an XMPP client (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16352711 for some client options).
  - jhasse 9y ago
    A smartphone isn't required for Telegram either.
- TheKarateKid 9y ago
  Incorrect. Whatsapp refuses to open on my iPad and isn't even available in the App Store. The only reason it got on there was a glitch in Apple's app sync which must've auto-downloaded it since I have it on my iPhone.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Sorry, I was talking about Telegram. Should have made that more clear.
tyfon 9y ago
I'm using Signal on my linux desktop right now. It appears to be a packaged webpage but it works fine and is linked to my phone and laptop. All it require is a phone number, besides it's Snowden approved :)
- pmlnr 9y ago
  You're using signal in a browser on your linux desktop. Poke me when there's any way to connect via bitlbee or libpurple, like there is for ICQ, jabber, etc.
- colordrops 9y ago
  They lose all credibility when they force you to reveal your phone number. Doesn't matter who endorses it.
  - LamaOfRuin 9y ago
    They are entirely honest about their trade-offs. While those trade-offs may be deal-breakers for you, it should bolster their credibility.
balladeer 9y ago
I had signed up for Telegram on a phone, so can't say whether you can sign up w/o a phone (I think it would require SMS verification). It doesn't need you to be logged in on any phone however. You can use just the desktop app. In fact I am on some really crowded and hyperactive Telegram groups so can't even imagine keeping it on my phone. Besides not a single one of my IRL friends use Telegram. I see 3-4 names, maybe they had signed up once.
petre 9y ago
Wire doesn't. It uses the same protocol as Signal, has mobile, desktop and web apps and the source is on Github.

whateveruser 9y ago

Perhaps try Skype lite? It has almost zero bloat, and has been working flawlessly for all my needs.

pmlnr 9y ago
It that like the Facebook Lite app that's geofenced to emerging countries? How bloated an app has to be to make a company with the size of M$ to create an alternative client?
- Y_Y 9y ago
  I (relatively) happily use the Facebook Lite app in Ireland where I got it from Play Store. I'm not sure we're emerging from anything.
jackson1way 9y ago
"Introducing Skype Lite Built for India - Chat and share with friends." it appears to exist only for Android phones. It's nothing but a joke that you'd have to switch to a "lite" version that is built explicitly for India [because of bad infrastructure] just to make it work in a country with much better infrastructure. It's like buying a low-end car built for Indian market, because your regular car doesn't fit on the narrow roads in the US, the fuel consumption is too high, it leaks oil constantly and there is no service because nobody cares.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  This is a worthless analogy, because some software is paired down and is "built for india" it sucks? A paired down debloated skype sounds like a godsend to me.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    ...that's not what they were saying at all. The insults were being heaped on the 'normal' skype. And skype lite is definitely lacking in configuration, like the ability to make emoticons less annoying. (I've also switched to skype lite for the remaining two chats I'm in that use skype, now that the slightly-older android version stopped connecting and the newest interface is amazingly painful and laggy.)

tiagoespinha 9y ago

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. To me it feels like the open standards never really kept up with the times, which in a way paved the way to walled gardens by the giants (and, in case of Slack, not so giants) to fill the gap which the open standards refused to fill. I mean, sure IRC is awesome, text-only, channels, but emojis are limited to ASCII, inline GIFs are non-existent, and file-sharing (and/or storage) is rather clunky from what I remember from the old times. And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling (or at least it didn't last time I checked) and it's not very surprising that companies just capitalize on that and make their own platforms. Don't take me wrong though... it creeps me out how the company where I work trusts Slack with reams and reams of confidential documents, but I guess it's convenient to an extent which no other platform is.

cornholio 9y ago
> And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler problem than email spam. I think now the only escape from the walled gardens is regulatory pressure forcing interconnect of the larger players (Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc.) at least at text chat level.
- nextos 9y ago
  XMPP is a bit complex, and suffers from some problems derived from too much flexibility. The mandatory part of the protocol is too small. This could be fixed by creating a meta XEP that lists all XEPs needed by modern clients. However, it's a very capable protocol. Just see how nice conversations.im is. It doesn't even use GCM, and both latency and energy usage are fantastic.
  - ossguy 9y ago

tandav 9y ago

There're thousands of companies in Russia using Telegram as main communication tool.

hota_mazi 9y ago

> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol. It's all about product design and user interface.

digi_owl 9y ago
And the more i read about Slack the less i want to touch it. Emoji, gifs, fuck off.
Dylan16807 9y ago
And the failing of the walled gardens is that you can't choose the product design and user interface you want and use it to talk to everyone.
seba_dos1 9y ago
Slack provides IRC relay, which initially was almost feature complete, but got out of date with time. Anyway, in some time Slack will probably fade away as quickly as it appeared, further contributing to the problem grandparent noticed and you seem to misunderstand.

luka-birsa 9y ago

I'd just like to add that one of the key things I love about the current crypto craze is the fact that it gives us something that never existed before - the capability to monetize protocols. I know that most ICOs will fail, but through this process we might get something that solves this shitty situation with chat applications.