3 ms·

> Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. IMO that is really on

by chme 9y ago

> Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. IMO that is really one personal hell for me. I blame android and apple for this. I was happy with my N900 where you got one chat application that supported SMS, Skype, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, whatever. The world was so simple back then. Now everything has to be a separate "app", where previous there where just plugins. Such a decline in usability.

distances 9y ago
As a former user of N900 I get your point, but frankly I don't mind at all. For me it makes no difference if I need to open one app or another, it's the same amount of tapping. So I'm in the camp who wouldn't mind federation, but won't bother to lift a finger for it either.
Fnoord 9y ago
Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) and its subproject libpurple is the one to thank for. Telepathy [1] and Bitlbee [2] are based on that. I used all of these throughout the '00s. Before the Nokia N900, I used a Nokia E71 with Nimbuzz (basically proprietary but it runs something like Bitlbee under the hood on their servers). Some of these protocols are open, some are reverse engineered. Problem with the current generation is that they're focussed much more on security features such as E2EE. Although before GAIM, we had other applications which did multiple protocols we also had loads of single purpose applications for all these protocols you mentioned and a whole lot more. Back in the end of '90s if you wanted to run MSN and ICQ and AIM on Windows, you had to use a client for each of these. Its basically a cat and mouse game. Look at the history of the Skype support for an example of that. [1] https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ [2] https://www.bitlbee.org https://www.bitlbee.org

3 ms·

> Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. IMO that is really on

by chme 9y ago

distances 9y ago
As a former user of N900 I get your point, but frankly I don't mind at all. For me it makes no difference if I need to open one app or another, it's the same amount of tapping. So I'm in the camp who wouldn't mind federation, but won't bother to lift a finger for it either.
Fnoord 9y ago
Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) and its subproject libpurple is the one to thank for. Telepathy [1] and Bitlbee [2] are based on that. I used all of these throughout the '00s. Before the Nokia N900, I used a Nokia E71 with Nimbuzz (basically proprietary but it runs something like Bitlbee under the hood on their servers). Some of these protocols are open, some are reverse engineered. Problem with the current generation is that they're focussed much more on security features such as E2EE. Although before GAIM, we had other applications which did multiple protocols we also had loads of single purpose applications for all these protocols you mentioned and a whole lot more. Back in the end of '90s if you wanted to run MSN and ICQ and AIM on Windows, you had to use a client for each of these. Its basically a cat and mouse game. Look at the history of the Skype support for an example of that. [1] https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ [2] https://www.bitlbee.org https://www.bitlbee.org