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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible.

I miss quite a few things about the Old Internet, and one of them is how easy Pidgin, Trillian, and the like made talking to people on Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, or whatever. I think I even used a social media aggregator at one point so I could stay current on Facebook and Twitter at the same time.

I don't think that's possible anymore. Talking to people cross-platform is definitely not possible without something like Beeper (which is buggy, but not because of Beeper)

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Daily user of Beeper -- iMessage, Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix, Slack, and Facebook Messenger. The last thing I'd consider "buggy" was not being able to create text groups, but that was solved within the last few months, and itself was just a missing feature. It's incredibly stable, in fact I've disabled the built in iMessage app on my iPhone and Mac for the last year with not one issue. Would highly recommend!

I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms.

For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com.

It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not.

But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem!

In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.

Just looked into this and signed up, I'm 127,000 in queue for access, any chance you would be willing to help with a referral code?

Oh, very nice. I had no idea this was possible. I would be concerned about privacy though...

> It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible

Is it really impossible or just very difficult? To me it seems like it's the latter since alternative frontends as in libredirect [0] exist for many sites. You can't rely on APIs and would need to build custom browser simulation for each site. That's certainly difficult, but doesn't seem impossible?

I don't see how these sites could ever make automation completely impossible without locking out humans as well.

[0] https://libredirect.github.io/index.html

It's technically very easy. It's legally extremely difficult. And they will find you doing your own thing and stop you.

Well, technically speaking it's impossible for them to "find you" as there is no way to distinguish between a sophisticated enough bot and a human user.

It's not impossible but writing the Puppeteer or Selenium incantations needed to scrape these sites (whose elements change fairly regularly) is a lot more work than "implement this API and get tokens via OAuth standard grant flow"

And that's before you get to the Cloudflare final boss

Sure, ultimately it’s just one computer interacting with another one, exchanging messages over the network, so anything is possible. But is anyone willing to do it; is it worth the effort?

Because god forbid you not be inundated with ads and have every movement online tracked and catalogued

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