Ask HN: Multi-Protocol Chat Clients

[iroddis]

At the moment, I have MacOS desktop clients for Discord, Slack, Mattermost, Signal, iMessage/SMS, Teams, and IRC. I have tabs open for social media messengers. It's a lot of real estate dedicated to essentially the same thing.

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a native chat client that could talk to all of these (or more) and present a single window?

I looked into Matrix via Element One, but Matrix's bridging method requires me to add a bot to servers I may not control (e.g. Slack and Teams where I'm connecting to clients' instances and I have no ability to add bots). Pidgin seems to be poorly supported on MacOS, as most of the plugins seem to be Linux-only.

What I'm really after is an app that will log in as me to all of these services.

tl;dr I'm drowning in chat solutions, and need something to mux all these clone services.

[LinuxBender]

AFAIK unless something has changed, Discord will globally ban people if they are discovered to be using a non approved client. I have no idea how often this occurs. This came up because folks had created clients such as BetterDiscord that add features which Discord want to sell and add end-to-end encryption using OTR. Discord want to be able to log all messages and OTR breaks that functionality for the servers.

[zebracanevra → LinuxBender]

From a discord staff: "We currently don't intentionally block or disable third party clients or action the accounts of people who use them. We do monitor the traffic of spammers and we build heuristics around how to identify them -- and sometimes third party clients get caught up in that. [...] it's not us trying to block/come after well-behaved third party clients."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32475188

[jamessb]

Ferdium [1] will at least cover Discord/Slack/Mattermost/Teams, if not Signal, iMessage and IRC.

"Ferdi is a hard-fork of Franz, and Ferdium is a hard-fork of Ferdi" [2].

The available services are listed here [3].

[1]: https://ferdium.org/

[2]: https://github.com/ferdium

[3]: https://github.com/ferdium/ferdium-recipes/tree/main/recipes

[iroddis → jamessb]

This project is amazing, and looks to be exactly what I'm looking for. Thank you very much!

[roguesherlock]

Maybe beeper ?

https://www.beeper.com/

[solardev → roguesherlock]

Is this real? It's just a bunch of screenshots with a generic Airtable form. No details about how it works...

[RunningDroid → solardev]

IIRC the "this week in matrix" that introduced it mentioned that its a matrix client with matrix bridges

[ev1 → solardev]

I'm assuming setup and onboarding is painfully manual because I can't imagine not being permanently banned from half the list of services for using a third party or coming from a "cloud" IP

[roguesherlock → solardev]

I’ve personally not tried it but the founder is the creator of pebble watch so that does give me a bit of confidence.