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Comment by bristleworm | Hacker News Reader

Some valid points there. The problem, for me at least and I guess many other people, is that the vast majority of my contacts uses WhatsApp. I know this probably will never happen, but what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use. Back in the late 90s there were plenty of internet messengers such as ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger, and IIRC it wasn't long before universal clients were developed.

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If you have a server available, have some time and don't mind fiddling with some config files, you could install a Matrix homeserver.

Matrix is a relatively new open source message protocol that offers various bridges to connect to other chat/messenger services: https://matrix.org/bridges/

I've heard that one before.

All my contacts are on msn.

On skype.

On myspace.

On facebook.

Now on whatsapp.

It will change.

The only things that haven't up to now are postal addresses, emails and phone numbers.

Will the replacement be any better in this regard though?

It depends on us.

If we choose things mainly because "all my friends are on it", then no.

I don't have a fb account. I don't have whatsapp. Never had.

Yet I have a very rich social life and maintain relationship with people far away.

The tools we use are a choice.

The price we pay is different depending on that choice.

Chicken and the egg. If you're sufficiently close to people to convince them to use SMS/Signal/Matrix/whatever with you, then sure, you'll be fine. But what if you're not? What if it's either "install WhatsApp and join our group chat" or nothing?

I don't. Everybody got a phone number, sms and email. So if we don't share a tool, I fall back to that, to face to face, accept a delay or be left out of the loop.

The secret is to focus on quality, not quantity, and realize a lot of FOMO is involved.

If the quantity is zero, the quality doesn't matter - if the alternative to joining the group is to be left out of the loop, there is practically no choice.

For example, if they write - in the group - that the next meeting is 3 PM next Wednesday at so-and-so, unless you happen to run into them at that specific time your chances of knowing this are slim.

I ended up getting a Microsoft mail account because it was the only way (for us) to respond to customers who used MS's email. So email isn't immune from walling off of gardens either.

That sounds wrong. Is your DMARC / DKIM / SPF set up wrong for your email provider or something?

Are you constantly marked as spam?

It was a couple years ago now, SPF and DMARC (but not DKIM iirc) were sorted. At the time MS used a third party who you could pay to get "vetted", I got a response that the problem was our server host's had another IP (not the one our emails were sent from) that had once had spam sent from it. So the facts we were responding to customer emails, that our domain had ~12 years of good behaviour, and our email servers IP being clean weren't enough. Even "whitelisting" the domain from the Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com end didn't work.

I'm still smarting, we still sometimes have problems (from a different host now) but just resend via an outlook.com address and it's fine.

So, no never had our domain marked as spam on any dbl that I've checked (but only done that sporadically).

We also had a blip with Gmail around the same time (but not the exact same time), but I reported it as a false positive and it was fixed in a few days; no problems since.

We were/are sending so few emails (<1 day average) that it's not worth me spending a couple of days trying to see through the murk of MS to fix it. We're probably not losing any revenue, just have to treat MS sent emails differently to everyone else's.

Sounds wrong to me too ;o)

That's a pity. I wonder how you ever get off some organisation's bad lists!

> what I'd love to have is some kind of universal messaging app that connects to all services I want to use

There is (was?) plenty of said messengers; Trillian, Miranda, Pidgin, Adium to name a few, plus XMPP transports that could be used from any Jabber client. I've no idea though whether they're still around and play nice with modern walled gardens that require registration by phone no.

For desktop, but it might be useful nonetheless: https://meetfranz.com/

I used Franz a while back but dropped it because if performance issues. Since it uses the web version of the apps it supports, the performance was just abysmal (most notably on Discord). It's a neat idea that doesn't work very well in practice unfortunately.

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