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Comment by pferde | Hacker News Reader

Remember about 20 years ago, when it was about protocols and not about brand names? You could have all the chat services in one client, complete with merging contacts from different services.

Nowadays, you have to jump through hoops to get even a few of the messaging services in one program, it's clunky and barely works, and you'd be breaking terms of service of half of them. Also, it would break anyway in a week or two, because the service owner changed something in the proprietary protocol.

Fortunately, with Matrix and a few other pioneers, it's getting better again, but in the meantime, there is an entire generation used to having their communication hamstrung by american corporations.

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It was all about brand names 20 years ago too. None of the big IM services of the time were interoperable. The only reason Trillian worked was because its developers put enormous amounts of work into reverse-engineering proprietary, undocumented chat protocols. Periodically a protocol would change, and then Trillian would stop working with that service until the developers could crack it again. At one point AOL got serious enough about blocking Trillian access to AIM that they were changing the protocol every couple of days.

I guess what I’m saying is, things sucked just as much then as they do now. Maybe more! Sigh.

That's not necessarily true. Jabber was a huge protocol already and IRC was big too and those were not about brand names. Jabber was even so ubiquitous that Google Chat/Talk both used it as a backend. You could add Google Chat to any client that supported Jabber. It wasn't until AOL got wind of AIM being a way to grab more ads and cash that things changed.

Twenty years ago was the year 2000. Trillian first shipped as freeware that year, and shipped its for-pay "Pro" version in 2002. Jabber/XMPP development only started in 1999, and didn't reach RFC status until 2004. Google Talk didn't ship until 2005, and didn't support federation until 2006. The heyday of "XMPP all the things" was from 2008-2012 or so, with the high water mark being the adoption of XMPP by Facebook Chat circa 2010. (A decision they eventually reversed a few years later.)

IRC was of course always open, but that's kind of orthogonal to this discussion as it never really had any traction with the general public the way AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. did.

I posit that things sucked less back then. Sure, there were some protocols whose owners would break things on purpose, but on the other hand, those times gave us libpurple.

Also, users weren't yet conditioned to expect proprietary chat apps and nothing else back then. Recently, I installed a small family Matrix server, for chatting and sharing photos. I had one heck of a time explaining that the client app (Riot) is named differently from the protocol (Matrix). And I'm glad I did not have to explain why the server software has yet another name (Synapse).

(In the end, I went with comparison to e-mail, which has different clients like Outlook or Thunderbird. That seems to have lit some overhead lightbulbs. :) )

I remember ICQ not being nice to alternative clients just as well

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