Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.
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
"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".
Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.
* 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).
Or delete them!
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.
You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.
I miss it.
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.
On your desktop you can just connect with any matrix client (or beeper electron app) and effectively use your phone as a proxy to Messenger/WhatsApp/etc.
Only downside is missing audio/video calling (should be enforced in 2028).
Is it official integration then? Do you have source for that claim?
“…and you can see our facebook sign-ups during this past quarter were significant, showing how people are just clamoring for our AI offerings. With your investment, we can keep this going.”
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 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.
It's strange to abandon the Messenger brand for such a reason.
I was similarly surprised when MS abandoned the MSN Messenger brand.
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.
Next, expect to have to install Facebook app to access Messenger.
So this is full circle. First it was like that (facebook.com/messages), then we were redirected to messenger.com. Now we're back to the beginning!
Strangely it works very well in the browser, but they can't spy you as easily so they don't like that.
This is obviously an attempt to get more traffic to facebook.com, but the chat UI there is just so much worse.
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
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260217203236/https://dzrh.com....
Gogo internet archive
* 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
Not much difference.
- 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.
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.
the other problem with the network effects is a business problem. There's is no business problem here though. If you maximize compatibility without caring to own anything several problems disappear.
cc @dang
The future Meta AI would have seemingly fit rightly in there.
