[paulryanrogers]

A brief period (~2008-2015) when XMPP had momentum and federation was trendy, if incomplete.

Apps like Trillian, Pidgin (Gaim), Adium actually allowed chatting across many platforms on the client side. To some extent they still can, with add-ons.

[nextos]

This was a great time, and I indeed miss XMPP, with proper federation to lots of different servers, including Google Talk, and Jingle videocalls!

Modern XMPP is really great, Conversations is a fantastic client, supports E2E encryption, is open source, and makes minimal use of resources.

[stavros]

But there's nobody on it :(

[kuschku]

That's precisely what the primary Beeper Cloud and the old Element One product are for. Just connect to your Signal, Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage accounts and chat with all of them in one single app.

Beeper Cloud and Element One do this through matrix bridges, but Beeper has been trying to move this entirely into the client again, which is what Beeper Mini is an experiment for.

If Beeper Mini succeeds, it'll soon also support Signal, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. If Apple succeeds, messaging will remain fragmented.

[mcpeepants]

Trillian was a fantastic piece of software

[sroussey]

So did iMessage back then.