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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

In 2025 you can use Beeper (or run your own local Matrix server with the opensource bridges) and get the same result with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, Google Messages, etc. etc.

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You'd have to break most of those platforms' TOS to do so.

Was Pidgin TOS-compliant back in the day? I'm a young whippersnapper, so I don't have experience with it myself.

Well it did have to change its name from GAIM to Pidgin at some point because it infringed on "AIM" by AOL. And whether or not Pidgin was fully "TOS-compliant" (which it might have been depending on the service we'd be looking at) is not as relevant as whether these terms would have been actually legally enforceable or not.

That was due to a trademark violation and nothing to do with TOS.

We (Pidgin/Gaim/Finch/libpurple) have never been TOS compliant.

That's always been the case. Jailbreaking your phone is also breaking TOS. Sideloading apps on iPhone by using the developer features is breaking TOS. Almost anything that gives a corporation less money or control over you is against that corporation's TOS. That's not the law, though, and we need to grow a collective spine.

... It's a lot easier to have a spine about risking getting banned from a service if getting banned from that service wouldn't destroy your life.

isn't beeper non-free? there aren't that many decent matrix bridges.

All the Beeper bridges are open source and self hostable: https://github.com/beeper

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