8 ms·

I miss the days when chat wasn't fragmented across apps and platforms or could at least be unified in apps like Adium. Having to have a different app installed

by cdme 3y ago

I miss the days when chat wasn't fragmented across apps and platforms or could at least be unified in apps like Adium. Having to have a different app installed for myriad different contacts is, at best, irritating.

lapinot 3y ago
Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Youden 3y ago
    I think that's essentially their point. The root of the term "balkanized" is war and the person they're replying to could have used a word with less violent connotations like the ones listed.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    FYI "TW" is outdated language and shouldn't be used any more. The phrase can elicit stress about what's to follow, and the t-word is associated with violent imagery.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      Imagery is problematic, it is an aggression to put a picture into another person’s head without informed consent
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - lapinot 3y ago
    Wth are you talking about? My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness, which you seem quite eager to hit on. I guess i'm not used to this kind of americanization of the debate and i must've said something very wrong to say without realizing. Point is the phrase is completely excessive in this context, we're talking about exchanging text messages. Yes aim and gtalk was funny but there is some romanticizing about "the old web".
    - nvy 3y ago
      >My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness Yes it did. Here it is, reproduced: >Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium. In this comment, you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. Your comment could be replaced with "adium good" and it would retain all its utility. Yet, you felt it was necessary to police the language of someone else using a benign and commonplace term ("Balkanized") because it offended your particular sensibilities. Welcome to the internet. People say things you disagree with regularly. If the term Balkanized offends you, please do not visit 4chan, reddit, twitter, or mastodon. Your comment quoted above is of the absolute lowest quality, adds nothing to the conversation, and serves only to drag the quality of conversation down into the muck where the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.
      - lapinot 3y ago
        Thanks for lecturing me about the web. As is pretty evident in this subthread, there are definitely people here on hn that seem to be overly sensitive to self-proclaimed policing. Once again one last time: my response was calling the parent hyperbolic and actually imprecise. I couldn't have provoked this kind of reaction had i wanted to. TIL > the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about. Just wow. Which would be who exactly in this subthread? The amount of fact reversal to get to this conclusion is quite amazing.
Shawnj2 3y ago
IIRC that is the original goal of beeper, to act as a universal messenger front end
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  So the end result will be dozens of 'universal' 'standards'?
  - Gud 3y ago
    I think in the end, whoever chooses to block these apps(Trillian, Pidgin, etc) too hard will be the ones left in the dust.
    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      Evidently that isn't the case.
      - tshirthoodie 3y ago
        yet
  - stetrain 3y ago
    A client that can interop with multiple services isn't adding a new standard.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    The end result will likely be a few apps that do the legwork to beat the various messaging platforms into some common denominator feature set and give you a single pane of glass. Unsiloing messaging isn't some quick fix. It would be like saying "we have all these forums like HN, Reddit, Twitter, SpaceHey, Facebook they should all share a global identity system and be able to be used all by a single app with the same APIs." Like we can't even make a generic ActivityPub client.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    If clients supporting multiple protocols become popular they could default to a sensible open protocol. Which, as the default in the popular app(s), would become the most widely used protocol. People can switch at their leisure because the app supports both, but over time the users transition because it's the default. Since the old and proprietary protocols are only sustained by the network effect, they lose users, and eventually support for them gets dropped. It's a method of transitioning from a collection of proprietary systems with their own network effects to an open one, by temporarily supporting both. For obvious reasons the operators of the proprietary systems don't want to be subject to that competition, which is they same reason they shouldn't be allowed to shut it out.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
Pidgin supports a good number of chat clients :) They lost the battle for a while there when walled gardens went up, but then won later on and regained support. https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type= https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type= No iMessage, of course, but you might find it helpful to see the list of supported clients.
rrreese 3y ago
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.
- jedberg 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - albert180 3y ago
      That's also possible with XMPP and Matrix. They just liked to get away with closing their fences
    - alwayslikethis 3y ago
      I think their switch away from XMPP predates E2EE and some of them still aren't using E2EE, so that's not the real reason. XMPP has good E2EE now with OMEMO though.
    - jen20 3y ago
      > since there was never an official MSN messenger client there. There certainly was: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1
vikramkr 3y ago
It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. In sympathetic to the fragmentation take honestly, apple doesn't stop you from installing Whatsapp, but it's an interesting situation where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed
- enragedcacti 3y ago
  > It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. They are both issues! Fragmentation in messaging is a real problem in the US, and iMessage has for a decade been the closest to a solution for iPhone users. Users' frustration with fragmentation pushes them into the app where 1) they know the message will get there, and 2) there's a 50% chance the experience won't suck. iMessage's existence in a fragmented market and refusal to interoperate all but guarantees the fragmentation will continue.
- willseth 3y ago
  > where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed The folks complaining are a vocal minority of Android users. Everyone else doesn't care.
m463 3y ago
apple did the "embrace, extend, extinguish" with this. the original apple messages app did AOL messenger and others. then it gradually forced you off of them into imessage.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  The main services iChat supported - AIM and Yahoo Messenger are gone. Google Chat no longer supports XMPP. I don't know anything about Facebook Messenger. Increasingly messaging services became siloed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by cdme 3y ago

lapinot 3y ago

Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium.

jrflowers 3y ago
[flagged]
- Youden 3y ago
  I think that's essentially their point. The root of the term "balkanized" is war and the person they're replying to could have used a word with less violent connotations like the ones listed.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  FYI "TW" is outdated language and shouldn't be used any more. The phrase can elicit stress about what's to follow, and the t-word is associated with violent imagery.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    Imagery is problematic, it is an aggression to put a picture into another person’s head without informed consent
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- lapinot 3y ago
  Wth are you talking about? My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness, which you seem quite eager to hit on. I guess i'm not used to this kind of americanization of the debate and i must've said something very wrong to say without realizing. Point is the phrase is completely excessive in this context, we're talking about exchanging text messages. Yes aim and gtalk was funny but there is some romanticizing about "the old web".
  - nvy 3y ago
    >My comment had nothing to do with trigger warning or any kind of sensitiveness Yes it did. Here it is, reproduced: >Couldn't you have said "compartmentalized", or "dominated by hostile silos" or anything else that doesn't involve comparison of the state of online chatting with wars that have killed humans? I agree things were nice with adium. In this comment, you have nothing of value to add to the conversation. Your comment could be replaced with "adium good" and it would retain all its utility. Yet, you felt it was necessary to police the language of someone else using a benign and commonplace term ("Balkanized") because it offended your particular sensibilities. Welcome to the internet. People say things you disagree with regularly. If the term Balkanized offends you, please do not visit 4chan, reddit, twitter, or mastodon. Your comment quoted above is of the absolute lowest quality, adds nothing to the conversation, and serves only to drag the quality of conversation down into the muck where the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about.
    - lapinot 3y ago
      Thanks for lecturing me about the web. As is pretty evident in this subthread, there are definitely people here on hn that seem to be overly sensitive to self-proclaimed policing. Once again one last time: my response was calling the parent hyperbolic and actually imprecise. I couldn't have provoked this kind of reaction had i wanted to. TIL > the rest of the faux-intelligentsia strive to find new things they can be outraged about. Just wow. Which would be who exactly in this subthread? The amount of fact reversal to get to this conclusion is quite amazing.

Shawnj2 3y ago

IIRC that is the original goal of beeper, to act as a universal messenger front end

MichaelZuo 3y ago
So the end result will be dozens of 'universal' 'standards'?
- Gud 3y ago
  I think in the end, whoever chooses to block these apps(Trillian, Pidgin, etc) too hard will be the ones left in the dust.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Evidently that isn't the case.
    - tshirthoodie 3y ago
      yet
- stetrain 3y ago
  A client that can interop with multiple services isn't adding a new standard.
- Spivak 3y ago
  The end result will likely be a few apps that do the legwork to beat the various messaging platforms into some common denominator feature set and give you a single pane of glass. Unsiloing messaging isn't some quick fix. It would be like saying "we have all these forums like HN, Reddit, Twitter, SpaceHey, Facebook they should all share a global identity system and be able to be used all by a single app with the same APIs." Like we can't even make a generic ActivityPub client.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  If clients supporting multiple protocols become popular they could default to a sensible open protocol. Which, as the default in the popular app(s), would become the most widely used protocol. People can switch at their leisure because the app supports both, but over time the users transition because it's the default. Since the old and proprietary protocols are only sustained by the network effect, they lose users, and eventually support for them gets dropped. It's a method of transitioning from a collection of proprietary systems with their own network effects to an open one, by temporarily supporting both. For obvious reasons the operators of the proprietary systems don't want to be subject to that competition, which is they same reason they shouldn't be allowed to shut it out.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

Pidgin supports a good number of chat clients :) They lost the battle for a while there when walled gardens went up, but then won later on and regained support. https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type= https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type= No iMessage, of course, but you might find it helpful to see the list of supported clients.

rrreese 3y ago

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.

jedberg 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - albert180 3y ago
    That's also possible with XMPP and Matrix. They just liked to get away with closing their fences
  - alwayslikethis 3y ago
    I think their switch away from XMPP predates E2EE and some of them still aren't using E2EE, so that's not the real reason. XMPP has good E2EE now with OMEMO though.
  - jen20 3y ago
    > since there was never an official MSN messenger client there. There certainly was: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/989-msn-messenger-2-5-1

vikramkr 3y ago

It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. In sympathetic to the fragmentation take honestly, apple doesn't stop you from installing Whatsapp, but it's an interesting situation where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed

enragedcacti 3y ago
> It's interesting to simultaneously see takes complaining about fragmentation and apple having monopoly power in this thread. They are both issues! Fragmentation in messaging is a real problem in the US, and iMessage has for a decade been the closest to a solution for iPhone users. Users' frustration with fragmentation pushes them into the app where 1) they know the message will get there, and 2) there's a 50% chance the experience won't suck. iMessage's existence in a fragmented market and refusal to interoperate all but guarantees the fragmentation will continue.
willseth 3y ago
> where it's folks who opted into a closed system that are complaining about the system being closed The folks complaining are a vocal minority of Android users. Everyone else doesn't care.

m463 3y ago

apple did the "embrace, extend, extinguish" with this. the original apple messages app did AOL messenger and others. then it gradually forced you off of them into imessage.

jonhohle 3y ago
The main services iChat supported - AIM and Yahoo Messenger are gone. Google Chat no longer supports XMPP. I don't know anything about Facebook Messenger. Increasingly messaging services became siloed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]