[MereInterest]

And every one of them needs a separate client, with a separate list of friends and handles, a separate program to check and monitor, ensuring that they are well-behaving. The current generation of software has no equivalent of Trillian or Pidgin, which could interact across any protocol. Heck, the current generation has no concept of "protocols" at all, instead treating the network communication as something entirely internal and subservient to the program running it.

[29083011397778]

...well every one of them except Matrix, which can plug into Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, and Google Chat - which I'm using all of!

[bigiain]

I know a lot of people hate it, but Signal piggybacking on your phone number and native contact list is a reasonable workaround to that “seperate contact list” issue. And mobile push notifications make that “a seperate program to check and monitor” a non problem, at least for me.

[Fnoord]

Did you check Franz/Ferdi? Though its Electron, it does support a lot of protocols.

People here (NL) barely use iMessage. They use WhatsApp mainly. I prefer (and do use mainly) Signal. For group chat, Matrix. Though Discord is (unfortunately) very popular. I dig it only for gaming.

[tentacleuno]

Doesn't Ferdi just put everything into an embedded browser and call it a day? I may be wrong here as I used it for a brief stint, but that is basically what I picked up from it.