I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Am I too old that one of these should've been Skype?
I abandoned my chat to make a new one in Discord. Despite them complaining about Skype daily for years, suddenly they loved Skype.
Humans are silly. Either way, it's been Discord, Snapchat, and regular text for half a decade now.
I didn't known Skype still existed and i thought I was getting old.
Sorry dude.
And other countries don't understand why US users stick to txt/mms.... Its convenient and built into the phone so everyone has it.
Don't have friends. Problem solved.
Matrix with bridges can help consolidate them. Some managed versions exist like Beeper and Element. Been slowly moving to that. Will eventually self host.
Yeah... This 1000 times... It DOES bother me to install all that shit. What doesn't bother me? Installing a bridge on Matrix and having everything in one place. Hell I've even started adding matrix to my linux scripts. I get notifications about script status in dedicated spaces on my single chat window.
I'm literally SMS away from doing 100% of the chat clients I use for personal usage... And seriously debating on bridging teams for work usage.
I've even gotten my wife onboard. That, to me, speaks about how frustrated normal people are with having many different apps as well.
Element has bridges to some of the services
I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just... boring.
Your options are RCS, Signal, or Lemmy mentions. Or losing contact with me I guess but I'm irresistible
So.... proprietary data collecting thing owned by Google, service that requires phone number to sign up, or service that does not even pretend to be E2EE and (worse) routes chat traffic through multiple potentially-adversary-controlled servers on its way to you?
Beeper!
I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness
Let's just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern "chat" landscape is dismal.
What is the middle one?
Element. It's a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.
