Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.

Does not everyone still use it?

I and most of my friends do.

They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890

jandrese

Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month.

I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through.

chipx86

So, aside from Jabber, IRC, and the AIM TOC protocol (which was the weaker version — we used OSCAR, which was not open), we had to reverse-engineer most of the protocols, and keep up-to-date with changes. Often these services actively tried to block us, and we would spend weeks or months working around their changes. Yahoo was notorious for this.

It's not entirely different than the current situation, in that regard, but there was also less security baked in on the older services, and much of the protocols were in plain text.

It's funny. I was just reminiscing about all this a few days ago on Twitter. https://twitter.com/chipx86/status/1352371276464050181

While I'm out of the IM game (gaim?) these days, I'd be very interested in any modern attempts to reverse-engineer these modern services, and whether the pushback from companies would be any different.

exikyut

Well, sadly there's the fact that Discord has finally pulled out the official laser beams for the alternative client scene, such that Cordless recently called it quits: https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless

Ripcord (https://cancel.fm/ripcord/) doesn't seem to be giving any indications that it no longer works, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and probably for fairly large values of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ too)

My computer is generally only able to handle one Chromium-based HI I EAT ALL YOUR RAM AND GPU, so I basically treat Discord like email as a result of the no-3rd-party-app policy. Given that the Discord "app" is just Electron, it'll get in a fight with the poor thermal design of my laptop in exactly the same way on the website does.

This being said, it's very difficult for me to argue loudly against the position they're, because it's complicated.

Discord has scaled to the point where "13 year old skiddies who like pulling legs off spiders will use any alternate clients they find [which don't include anti-spam protection] to send a {server,reputation}-destroying level of spam" is having a more measurable impact than "we need to maintain equality of access". I suspect that extremely strong management vision+competence would be necessary to prioritize this - as things stand right now, it's incredibly easy to deprioritize because the vast majority of people using Discord either have minimally-viably decent machines appropriate for playing games or completing actual day jobs.