@starlord

[Edit: is BEEPER the one Messenger to rule them all? Billed as self-hostable and Open Source, native to Matrix but with integrations to act as front end for What’s App, Signal Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc… this is looking promising! Anyone have experience? https://www.beeper.com/ ]

Remember the great Instant Messenger schism? (I know, I’m dating myself) Back in the day AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and MSN Messenger were the top IM platforms, while the IT crowd self-hosted IRC servers. None of these platforms were interoperable, each set up with different protocols in walled gardens. What was the answer for those of us who wanted it all? Third party cross-platform apps that integrated with each major API and provided a unified front-end, with Trillian being the most widely adopted to my knowledge.

WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and all the rest of the single-host messengers are just Instant Messenger platforms wrapped an an App shell with different encryption layers. The answer that we are all craving is a Trillian for the current generation, bundling SMS in with all these other platforms, however as I understand it these service providers no longer offer API access that would allow a third party front end client. The walled gardens no longer have gates, and the enshitification is progressing.

Note that there were official attempts to unify the original IM platforms with interoperability, but to quote wikipedia:

"Most attempts at producing a unified standard for the major IM providers (AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft) have failed, and each continues to use its own proprietary protocol.

However, while discussions at IETF were stalled, Reuters signed the first inter-service provider connectivity agreement in September 2003. This agreement enabled AIM, ICQ and MSN Messenger users to talk with Reuters Messaging counterparts and vice versa. Following this, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL agreed to a deal in which Microsoft’s Live Communications Server 2005 users would also have the possibility to talk to public instant messaging users. This deal established SIP/SIMPLE as a standard for protocol interoperability and established a connectivity fee for accessing public instant messaging groups or services. Separately, on October 13, 2005, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that by the 3rd quarter of 2006 they would interoperate using SIP/SIMPLE, which was followed, in December 2005, by the AOL and Google strategic partnership deal in which Google Talk users would be able to communicate with AIM and ICQ users provided they have an AIM account[…]

Certain networks have made changes to prevent them from being used by such multi-network IM clients. For example, Trillian had to release several revisions and patches to allow its users to access the MSN, AOL, and Yahoo! networks, after changes were made to these networks. The major IM providers usually cite the need for formal agreements, and security concerns as reasons for making these changes.

The use of proprietary protocols has meant that many instant messaging networks have been incompatible and users have been unable to reach users on other networks.[29] This may have allowed social networking with IM-like features and text messaging an opportunity to gain market share at the expense of IM.[30]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_messaging

History is doomed to repeat itself unless FOSS can win on convenience and UX. One could imagine a big player like Mozilla taking this on and rolling a messenger with an open protocol into their software stack, but that still wouldn’t kill the others due to network effect unless it had some killer app advantage.