Hi again!
I was wondering if there’s any chat clients out there that have support for a wide variety of protocols and services, ranging from XMPP to Matrix, Mattermost, Fluxer, SimpleX and Signal (I know the former four have their own issues with privacy and security, but those are only used for chats which are public, not DMs or private groups so it’s not the end of the world for me). I know a while back, on Mac OSX at least, there was Adium, but as far as I’m aware it’s abandonware these days and I don’t use a Mac anymore anyways. While I am aware of Beeper, unfortunately this is reliant on a cloud service for syncing accounts across devices, and while that’s fine if your threat model is okay with that, mine is not. I would prefer to keep everything local to my desktop computer, and not rely on a cloud service (this would also be a problem if say, I hosted my own Matrix server with puppeting bridges, which as far as I can tell is what Beeper does on the backend). Is there something like Adium or Pidgin but more modern? It would make dealing with the recent move of many groups off of Discord much easier for me.
The problem with these kinds of apps (Pidgin etc) and probably why they are less popular than back in the day, is that it’s against the TOS of most chat apps to use third party clients like this and you can and will be banned. So while there may be a plugin for a certain services on Pidgin or a Matrix bridge etc you risk losing your account over it. I think that’s why these apps fell out of favor.
https://ferdium.org/ is another option that does things within a browser window so should be safer theoretically but not sure if that is what you are looking for.
luckily I did check for the services I listed, and all of them seem to be fine with third party clients in their TOS (if they even have one). Pretty much the only one I’ve used that doesn’t is Discord, but I’m trying to move away from that anyways so this won’t be a concern for my specific use-case.
if it literally for chating and maybe small group chat, across any device type, i use both simplex and keet. I always try to steer people to simplex as i believe it is the safest one, keet is a little better for larger group chats. Both allow for anonymous personas in group chats