[Sakos]

I miss the days when I could fire up Pidgin (or Gaim when I started using it) and instantly connect to every IM service I ever needed. Hopefully this is a step back towards that.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Agreed. It genuinely feels like my online experience degraded over the course of the past decade or so, because I am less willing to join a specific walled garden. And then I remember that this is by design. The winner takes his/hers social circle to the winner garden.

[kilroy123]

Same here. That's why I paid to use beeper. It's amazing to have all my chats in one app again. (Not affiliated just love the experience)

[curiousgal]

I thought Whatsapp user terms phorbid users from using third-party clients. People were banned for that.

[bravura]

Could you please talk about the experience with Beeper? I always worried that I would get my accounts banned or similar.

What do you love, what is missing?

Can you organize the chats?

[kilroy123]

I too have been worried about that! They claim they'll offer a self-hosted version soon. I'd feel a lot more comfortable going that route so my IP is often from the same place.

Right now everything is running on their servers with god knows what IP addresses and from where.

So far I haven't been banned but I have had to reset my Facebook password once.

Instagram suddenly stopped working and I had to reconnect a few times.

So far WhatsApp is ok.

IMHO the iOS app is close to useless and I stopped using it.

The desktop app is where it's at and I'm only using that for now.

[pabs3]

You still can for many protocols, Pidgin has plugins for lots of modern protocols:

https://pidgin.im/plugins/

[devoutsalsa]

I still remember my ICQ number… 1057955. Been a long time since I tried accessing that account.