I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.
Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.
I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.
Mark Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters (a Harvard newspaper) who were investigating him for Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg's company took people's API-facing emails that were in their profiles and replaced them with a facebook.com address. Mark Zuckerberg's company deleted years of his own correspondence. This in addition to things like Onavo
Yeah, I'm suggesting he go to prison for "doing whatever he wants"
It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.
* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.
* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages
* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on
* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.
I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.
"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".
Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).
I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).
I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.
From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.
You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.
I'm one of those edge cases who uses Messenger.com a lot.
My facebook account is deactivated but I can keep on messaging. But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it).
So Mobile app would be my only option. Right now a lot of family members use Messenger, so it's not trivial to move away entirely.
My account is deactivated in the sense that I have neither chosen to accept tracking or pay the monthly fee to use Facebook that us EU users had to chose between in that evil modal dialog. I instead stopped using Facebook.
So my account is in a strange limbo where Messenger still works, but I can't use Facebook itself without choosing one of the two evils. So this will definitely be the final nail in the coffin for my Facebook account.
The only question is, how will I request takeout of my data when I can't do anything in the app before answering in that modal, and also, how do I delete my account? I do NOT want to click accept to the tracking, and I refuse to pay for an app haven't even used for several years now.
I'm a computer user. When I'm on a computer for work, or for fun, I prefer to be on my computer, and not stop and reach for a phone. I often have my phone in another room entirely. (On my main gaming PC, I use phone link to get texts on my computer as well!)
I also vastly prefer typing to the horrible swiping keyboard my phone uses. So for communicating via text, a computer is a much nicer solution, in my opinion.
I wish we went back to communication protocols, and allowed people to bring their clients. mIRC was my favourite era of async communication, now it's all just a giant spaghetti of apps.
I'm so piss off by website like messenger, or google meet for example that try to force you to install their app on your phone when you just when to send a message or make a call on the web app.
Strangely it works very well in the browser, but they can't spy you as easily so they don't like that.
Which one lets them hoover up more data? Probably the desktop app.
Which one lets them display more ads? Probably the site.
For my money, I've always felt like they've tried to force me to use their messenger app on my phone. A while back, desktop/web started asking for a PIN to restore messages. It doesn't always prompt, and sometimes messages are there which you'd think shouldn't be, based on the description of E2EE and the role the PIN plays in it. I did not set any PIN, so I of course don't know it. Resetting the PIN deletes my entire message history.
For that I would recommend extensions like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era... which clear the endless feed but still let you visit the site for messaging. You can probably also use uBlock Origin to do this if you don't want to install anything new.
how many people willing to update their hosts file to redirect internally so that you are still able to avoid typing facebook.com? If someone was willing to block the domain, I'm guessing a high percentage of those would be amenable.
These days I only use FB Messenger for the small few number of friends who still use Facebook and send me videos on there. But the experience of watching videos sent to you is so incredibly clunky - Messenger itself apparently can't just play the video, it has to kick you into the Facebook app, so watching 3 videos someone sent involves 6 jumps between apps. And the player in the Facebook app seems broken, seemingly sometimes there's no scrub bar, or if there's supposed to be one it doesn't work.
> The Messenger desktop app for macOS and Windows had already been discontinued in December 2025, with Meta removing the apps from official stores and encouraging users to transition to web‑based messaging well before April 2026. This policy change reflects a broader strategic shift by Meta toward browser‑based and mobile messaging, rather than maintaining separate native desktop clients, which historically saw less usage compared to mobile versions.
interesting. do we see this move with coding agents as well? we're also seeing kind of the opposite move of the chat AI apps from web/terminal -> TO desktop apps
for coding apps, I can see some silos happening, but I don't suspect it is realistic. For example, I'm vibing a mobile app and the binary is huge. I suspect there are too many use cases that will keep gravity towards the local machine. I also suspect that developers will not be tolerant to full remote dev environments.
It's funny to see this all go full circle. messenger.com was spun out of facebook.com to try to build a new platform. They promised interoperability with Instagram and WhatsApp accounts, although they never did a good enough job that you could just use one account across them.
Facebook really could have been the default online identity provider if they weren't such an abhorrently shitty company. In the early days, you wouldn't even ask for someone's number - you'd just chat on Facebook.
I think META like many other "service providers" don't yet realize, that it's becoming trivial to roll your own and all we need is a protocol. And arguably there are many. You can then use your existing social graph (anyone remembers this term? lol) to chat.
Your mom and granddad won't roll their own, but publishing an open service that uses FB openID and API while delegating to the open protocol is really not that hard. Browser local storage may not be ideal, but it's a good placeholder until something better can be implemented.
It's not the technology design that's that important. It's the network effect, and peoples' default trust in megacorps over volunteer projects. Both of which cannot be solved with just a protocol.
I think the natural and equivalent role of the USPS would be an ISP, rather than a "messaging platform" itself.
When the US Constitution was drafted in 1787, authorizing the new Federal government to run a postal service, carrying letters and packages via horse rider/wagons was the state-of-the-art.
It was always relatively trivial to roll your own messaging service. And open protocols exist (and predate messenger)! The thing you can't (easily) replicate are the network effects.
- Change user-agent to a desktop browser - any will do
- (optional) run social fixer while you're at it
I completely understand that iOS probably won't let you do this. I've been doing this on Android and Firefox, and the web experience on a phone is... functional. Since it thinks its a desktop, the page layout doesn't always gracefully fit into a portrait form-factor. Landscape mode helps in those cases.
they deny you access until you give them access...
fsck them! i blocked my fb account and not looking back. once it was a place to find and discuss with interesting people... but now it's just a cesspool of filtered irrelevance and propaganda.
I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.
Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.
https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/
I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.
Yeah but Facebook's 6 digit pin that they FORCED everyone on and severely disrupted messages and message history is totally a better system
Zuck deserves to be in prison along with other black hat hackers, this is just one of so many other things he's guilty of
I don't understand your point. Do you mean he should go to prison for doing whatever he wants with his own product?
Mark Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters (a Harvard newspaper) who were investigating him for Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg's company took people's API-facing emails that were in their profiles and replaced them with a facebook.com address. Mark Zuckerberg's company deleted years of his own correspondence. This in addition to things like Onavo
Yeah, I'm suggesting he go to prison for "doing whatever he wants"
Do you have citations for these claims?
To be clear. They're a weird goal post move from "FORCED a 6 digit pin"
Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.
Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.
I use Beeper now, but Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.
And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.
* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.
* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages
* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on
* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.
Same code in the background. Kopete for KDE could use Adium chat themes and emoticons.
Back when apps dared to have fun icons. I still smile when I open Cyberduck because of the hilarious icon (which is extremely well designed).
Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.
GTK+ is only a native GUI toolkit in GNOME.
> you could keep your chat logs forever
Or delete them!
I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.
"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".
Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.
Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.
It's still there! Gary and the team are hard at work on Pidgin 3
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).
[0] https://www.beeper.com/
I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).
I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.
I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.
I miss it.
From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.
You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.
I'm one of those edge cases who uses Messenger.com a lot.
My facebook account is deactivated but I can keep on messaging. But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it).
So Mobile app would be my only option. Right now a lot of family members use Messenger, so it's not trivial to move away entirely.
My account is deactivated in the sense that I have neither chosen to accept tracking or pay the monthly fee to use Facebook that us EU users had to chose between in that evil modal dialog. I instead stopped using Facebook.
So my account is in a strange limbo where Messenger still works, but I can't use Facebook itself without choosing one of the two evils. So this will definitely be the final nail in the coffin for my Facebook account.
The only question is, how will I request takeout of my data when I can't do anything in the app before answering in that modal, and also, how do I delete my account? I do NOT want to click accept to the tracking, and I refuse to pay for an app haven't even used for several years now.
Why not install just the Messenger app? I never install Facebook app, but I keep Messenger app to chat with my college peeps.
I'm a computer user. When I'm on a computer for work, or for fun, I prefer to be on my computer, and not stop and reach for a phone. I often have my phone in another room entirely. (On my main gaming PC, I use phone link to get texts on my computer as well!)
I also vastly prefer typing to the horrible swiping keyboard my phone uses. So for communicating via text, a computer is a much nicer solution, in my opinion.
But that doesn't work for desktop (they already killed the messenger desktop app)
I think some in your situation will reactivate Facebook, which must be part of the decision to stop messenger.com.
It's not a good solution, but you can use a mobile emulator on your desktop and use the mobile app there...
Likewise not a good solution, but: I use the Mac's iPhone Mirroring to chat with family on Messenger throughout the day.
I wish we went back to communication protocols, and allowed people to bring their clients. mIRC was my favourite era of async communication, now it's all just a giant spaghetti of apps.
I'm so piss off by website like messenger, or google meet for example that try to force you to install their app on your phone when you just when to send a message or make a call on the web app.
Strangely it works very well in the browser, but they can't spy you as easily so they don't like that.
Traffic to facebook.com must have dropped hard to make that kind of move.
It's strange to abandon the Messenger brand for such a reason.
I was similarly surprised when MS abandoned the MSN Messenger brand.
They really are forcing me to visit facebook.com in 2026 aren’t they? Guess I’ll stop using FB messenger when I’m on a computer.
Which one lets them hoover up more data? Probably the desktop app.
Which one lets them display more ads? Probably the site.
For my money, I've always felt like they've tried to force me to use their messenger app on my phone. A while back, desktop/web started asking for a PIN to restore messages. It doesn't always prompt, and sometimes messages are there which you'd think shouldn't be, based on the description of E2EE and the role the PIN plays in it. I did not set any PIN, so I of course don't know it. Resetting the PIN deletes my entire message history.
Which one lets them close off security loopholes scam farms use to automate scam messages and accounts? Probably getting rid of web and desktop.
It looks like https://www.facebook.com/messages is effectively the same thing.
yeah but messenger.com was nice if you've blocked the facebook.com domain to try to use less social media.
I imagine that's part of the motivation behind this decision.
For that I would recommend extensions like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era... which clear the endless feed but still let you visit the site for messaging. You can probably also use uBlock Origin to do this if you don't want to install anything new.
The blast radius is more corporate and school networks that block facebook.com
how many people willing to update their hosts file to redirect internally so that you are still able to avoid typing facebook.com? If someone was willing to block the domain, I'm guessing a high percentage of those would be amenable.
Hopefully that means they are still using/supporting Rescript.
These days I only use FB Messenger for the small few number of friends who still use Facebook and send me videos on there. But the experience of watching videos sent to you is so incredibly clunky - Messenger itself apparently can't just play the video, it has to kick you into the Facebook app, so watching 3 videos someone sent involves 6 jumps between apps. And the player in the Facebook app seems broken, seemingly sometimes there's no scrub bar, or if there's supposed to be one it doesn't work.
Huh... I have used messenger.com plenty.
* To share my account creds w/ a friend to help sift through many real estate leads we advertised on FB Marketplace.
* Working easily between FB ads and comms
* Linking things from my computer for a business-related group.
* Handling anything FB marketplace while in flow on my desktop.
Hopefully the replacement isn't worse
> The Messenger desktop app for macOS and Windows had already been discontinued in December 2025, with Meta removing the apps from official stores and encouraging users to transition to web‑based messaging well before April 2026. This policy change reflects a broader strategic shift by Meta toward browser‑based and mobile messaging, rather than maintaining separate native desktop clients, which historically saw less usage compared to mobile versions.
interesting. do we see this move with coding agents as well? we're also seeing kind of the opposite move of the chat AI apps from web/terminal -> TO desktop apps
for coding apps, I can see some silos happening, but I don't suspect it is realistic. For example, I'm vibing a mobile app and the binary is huge. I suspect there are too many use cases that will keep gravity towards the local machine. I also suspect that developers will not be tolerant to full remote dev environments.
this move has really made me think about moving away from messenger, i hate the website version and only use desktop app outside of phone app
Previously posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042390
Why do you post a proxy article instead of linking directly to source? Why does the website ask for my location?
I get a cloudflare message that I'm blocked. Doesn't ask for anything.
Straight from the Zuck's mouth: https://facebook.com/help/messenger-app/804132271957789?cms_...
cc @dang
It's funny to see this all go full circle. messenger.com was spun out of facebook.com to try to build a new platform. They promised interoperability with Instagram and WhatsApp accounts, although they never did a good enough job that you could just use one account across them.
Facebook really could have been the default online identity provider if they weren't such an abhorrently shitty company. In the early days, you wouldn't even ask for someone's number - you'd just chat on Facebook.
I think META like many other "service providers" don't yet realize, that it's becoming trivial to roll your own and all we need is a protocol. And arguably there are many. You can then use your existing social graph (anyone remembers this term? lol) to chat. Your mom and granddad won't roll their own, but publishing an open service that uses FB openID and API while delegating to the open protocol is really not that hard. Browser local storage may not be ideal, but it's a good placeholder until something better can be implemented.
It's not the technology design that's that important. It's the network effect, and peoples' default trust in megacorps over volunteer projects. Both of which cannot be solved with just a protocol.
Half the problem is "felony contempt of business model", where the legal system is wielded against anyone who would create pro-consumer tools.
This would be a natural role for the Post Office to take on, to provide a neutral ad-free, privacy-respecting messaging platform accessible to all.
I think the natural and equivalent role of the USPS would be an ISP, rather than a "messaging platform" itself.
When the US Constitution was drafted in 1787, authorizing the new Federal government to run a postal service, carrying letters and packages via horse rider/wagons was the state-of-the-art.
It was always relatively trivial to roll your own messaging service. And open protocols exist (and predate messenger)! The thing you can't (easily) replicate are the network effects.
There are already alternatives to these products; what would adding some more change?
I’m honestly incredibly surprised they would get rid of the desktop app just as desktop messaging apps have become their most important.
The future Meta AI would have seemingly fit rightly in there.
Didn't they kill the Mac desktop app last year?
$1.62bn market cap
What is that in reference to?
Source, earlier: https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/804132271957789 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042390)
I guess you just goto: https://www.facebook.com/messages/
Not much difference.
Does that work on mobile? It always prompts me to install Messenger.
My workaround here is/was:
- Install browser that lets you run plugins
- Change user-agent to a desktop browser - any will do
- (optional) run social fixer while you're at it
I completely understand that iOS probably won't let you do this. I've been doing this on Android and Firefox, and the web experience on a phone is... functional. Since it thinks its a desktop, the page layout doesn't always gracefully fit into a portrait form-factor. Landscape mode helps in those cases.
Yeah, my workaround is just going to the desktop version of Facebook when I absolutely must use it on my phone (usually marketplace-related.)
they deny you access until you give them access...
fsck them! i blocked my fb account and not looking back. once it was a place to find and discuss with interesting people... but now it's just a cesspool of filtered irrelevance and propaganda.
Mark Zuckerberg is a vile sociopath, I think the historical evidence long supports it
I stand by what I said, downvoters. It's the same company responsible for this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433