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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

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sdoering

Shortly after I started online in '97 I had a multitude of messangers/chat tools on my computer.

Some people used ICQ, some AIM, some Yahoo. Some IRC. And so it is today. At work and in private context.

I feel we have come full circle in the 20 or so years.

Now I have Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, FB Messenger, Slack, SMS, Google Hangouts, MS Teams on my mobile phone.

Not to forget that some use Instagram and some LinkedIn to communicate.

Nowadays I need to have a mapping table of whom to contact via which channel/app.

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But at least you could get a unified messenger for those services way back when.

The user experience these days is much, much worse, for almost no technical benefit (yay, audio messages, great…). Separate apps, (mostly) required to have a phone number to use them etc.

This reminds me of what’s currently happening with Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, HBO Max etc.

We’ve also come full circle with cable.

Not exactly yet. ATT is still at $139 (full package), I am using Hulu and sharing the pass with my family members, while they have netflix and sharing theirs with mine. $10 a month for me is not too bad to watch my fav Star Trek episodes on demand.

They can come full circle with anything they want at this point, worse case scenario I will torrent the hell out of everything and plex it with my nas if I am pushed enough.

Yes, I had hope in the early 2000's with XMPP, but considering 20 years later we still have a fragmented ecosystem and none of the actors are willing to push for a federated network (even the open source, NPO, Signal!) is really depressing.

Well this is no accident. The whole of HN has been Signal jerking for weeks now to the point where it is really obscene, with no consideration for the inherent flaws of Signal. If a community of supposedly technological savvy people care so little for what matters then we won't get something better, and in that case I'm sticking with WhatsApp unless others go to XMPP or Matrix.

whole hearted agree.

additional reminder that fb-messenger, whatsapp, imessage and probably a lot others started out as xmpp forks/dialects and even this was not enough to save us from the corporates.

Theres an xkcd for that, of course: https://xkcd.com/1810/

Thanks so much. Missed that one and loved it instantly.

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