Hacker News Reader

Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people (including myself) just need the feed. I personally preferred the clean approach because outside of Events, I never need the left navigation. Now it obnoxiously takes up a segment of the page and the main content in the center feels tight especially with the bigger typography.

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On the contrary, I don't need the feed at all. I use just the messaging features. I never post on the feed and everything I share is in the private or group messages.

If you don't need the feed you don't even need the web browser since the message system is bog standard jabber.

I do my FB messaging through Messages on my Mac and the FB Messages app on my phone. Works great.

Bog standard Jabber except for the changes they make - group messaging, 'seen' notifications, in line attachments, 'stickers' are all proprietary stuff which a standard jabber client doesn't support, unfortunately.

Their Facebook Messenger for Windows client was discontinued earlier this month unfortuntaely, so I'm back using Trillian and boy do I miss the group messaging feature.

(genuine question, I don't use FB chat)

How is group messaging different from MUC[1]? The naming group messaging sounds alike, but I don't know the internals of FBs feature.

in line attachments is also possible[2] - I assume you mean sending files, embedding photos in messages and such?

As for seen and stickers I don't know of a XMPP equivalent, but I am curious as to why MUC wasn't used instead of proprietary group messaging.

[1]: XEP-0045, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html

[2]: html and/or XEP-0231, http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0231.html

Recently I installed this "Kill the News Feed" Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kill-news-feed/hjo... Now I waste way less time.

Maybe you'll like it :-)

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