2 ms·

If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these wal

If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.

lxgr 3y ago
To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability. The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won. Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
pkulak 3y ago
The bridges are already free and open source and I don't see my friends and family racing to get them running on their laptops. Pidgin is great, but something needs to be running on a server or you don't get notifications. And without notifications, what's the point of a messaging app?
- rw_grim 3y ago
  I wrote more on this topic here https://dev.to/grim/why-is-there-no-mobile-version-of-pidgin-44df https://dev.to/grim/why-is-there-no-mobile-version-of-pidgin...