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Back in the day, messaging was pretty awesome. You could use an app like Pidgin and pretty much talk to anyone no matter what color their bubbles were.

Today, I have to have one app for all the different ways to get ahold of someone. It's pretty annoying, but we did it to ourselves. Yay.

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Agreed. Messaging absolutely blows compared to the glory days of a million interoperable chat clients with no one looking to exploit users for "increased engagement." I miss it all of the time. Beeper's trying to bring it back, but you can see, in real-time, how actively other companies are in trying to lock them out.

Try Ferdium, RAMbox, or Station.

All FOSS.

https://ferdium.org/

https://rambox.app/

https://getstation.com/

These all suck comapred to Pidgen. Pidgen was one UI. This is just a bunch of webapps shoved into the same window/app and it's ugly and awkward as all fuck to use.

Yes, agreed.

But it's still a lot better than 5, 6, 10 different apps.

Also, it's "Pidgin", as in "pidgin English."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

It's a word, not a weird made-up name.

https://www.beeper.com/ has been my main chat app aggregator, it's not perfect but works for most cases

You can also self host it

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