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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

As far as I'm aware, no other messaging service offers interop any more. We used to have it with XMPP, which got embraced and extinguished. Back in the day you could use an app like Adium or a library like Pidgin which understood all of the protocols.

It sounds to me like Apple could break out Messages from SMS and then Messages would just be another competitor on the market like FB Messenger, whatever the fuck Google is running now, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.

FWIW Beeper's 'esoteric' fix is a gaping security hole. Their product relies on MITM and they're obviously not going to profit off of a minimal subscription fee if they're buying Apple hardware to make it happen.

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Beeper Cloud is a MITM that relays through a Mac. Beeper Mini spoofs a real Mac's identity but connects directly to Apple. At first they were just using their own Macs for this, but then Apple blocked them, so now they're asking individual users to either use their own ID or beg a friend to auth them on theirs. Which is clearly not a reasonable business model, which is why they're now appealing to politicians.

Yeah, there’s no way that you can succeed as a business doing that. The Delta emulator on iOS works in a similar way and it’s such a hassle there’s just no way to make a viable paid product out of the process

> As far as I'm aware, no other messaging service offers interop any more.

XMPP still exists. Matrix exists now and is similarly an open protocol.

But none of the mainstream providers support it anymore. Slack got to where it is through XMPP, for example, but that support was readily dropped.

They've all silo'd up.

Okay, if you're only counting "mainstream" providers then... sure, but that's pretty subjective.

Element has government agencies as customers and lots of open source projects have Matrix rooms. Webex seems to still support XMPP federation. (No, I don't particularly like Webex either.) Are these the market leaders in chat? No, of course not. Do they get some use? They sure do.

What are webex and element?

Element is the company that mostly drives Matrix development.

Webex is a Cisco chat product that I think is mostly used by bigcorps. (Supposedly they have upwards of 10,000 employees on it, which feels crazy to me.)

Right, but ultimately they don't really matter. What matters is where your friends and family want to chat. Overwhelmingly, that's platforms like iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.

Small players use open protocols and even sometimes federate because they're small, and that sort of thing can be seen as a feature that people might care about. Large players don't have to care. They already have enough users that they don't need to play nice with others. And that's where only legislation can change things.

> As far as I'm aware, no other messaging service offers interop any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#St...

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