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Comment by roflmaostc | Hacker News Reader

Haha yeah. Within Pidgin I used ICQ, XMPP (over my own VPS), Skype, Facebook messenger, ...

Now I have to use different apps for Signal, Element, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, ...

Facebook via xmpp was the last thing Facebook was good for. It was nice to be able to strike up the occasional conversation with an old school friend or acquaintance. It really does feel like everyone is online more than ever yet somehow more isolated.

I can recommend beeper! I don't use it for encrypted messengers because I don't want to accidentally leak incoming messages that were sent with the expectation of e2ee. But it's great for catching a few of the odd ones.

Beeper (built on matrix) has convenient bridges to lots of services. You can use the hosted service or self-host (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager) or you can host plain matrix using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

"plain matrix" sounds a bit wrong - we put great effort into maintaining numerous of components of the playbook, including bridges, so it has a lot to offer. Alternatively, you can just get a managed server on https://etke.cc

Disclaimer: I'm Aine of etke.cc, and MDAD is our project

I'm sorry, bad choice of words. I didn't mean to imply that it's worse in any way. I use it myself. Uncustomized? Vanilla? Upstream? IIRC Beeper has patched various things.

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