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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Doesn't this exist? I used to use something like this called Pidgin back when MSN messenger was the most popular messaging program. I haven't used it in years though. I don't know how well it still works.

Pidgin is what you're thinking of. It does that for instant messaging services, including apparently having a plugin for Facebook Messenger that has recent issues on GitHub, so it seems to still be working for some people. There's also XMPP and it's modern competitor/replacement Matrix which have a concept of bridges which means you log into your one Matrix account but have that account bridged to other protocols (so similar concept, just putting the multi-protocol support in a different place in the architecture).

Needless to say, none of this is terribly user-friendly, largely because none of the companies running these services want third-party clients to work, so there's a continual arms race of protocol changes. For similar reasons, there will never be a commercial product because third-party clients are likely explicitly against the terms of service. Back when MSN and its ilk were popular, the arms race was less heated and they were more usable.

Also, this is all about instant messaging. Maybe that's all you care about, but if you want to keep track of non-chat-structured posts, then the closest I know of to a similar multi-protocol client for social media posts is setting them all up in an RSS reader. And for similar reasons, social media companies make it difficult to access posts that way, although it works for some / has worked for others in the past (e.g., I used to follow Twitter feeds via RSS).