this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024

207 points (91.6% liked)

Technology

58833 readers

4574 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

207

What Ever Happened to MSN Messenger? (www.techspot.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

118 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The bottom of the article links to the history (individual features) of other IM programs from that era as well like ICQ and Yahoo Messenger.

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Anyone remember the short-lived Great War of the Messenger Apps? For a few months back around... '98? '99? MSN tried really hard to shoehorn its way into working with AIM. About every day there would be an update from MSM Messenger to allow it to work with AIM. Then AOL would fuck with their own protocol to ice out MSN users again.

I think these shenanigans also impacted the Trillium Messenger app too, which up until then had been flying under the radar of messenger interoperability.

I might be getting some of these details wrong.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

And then Jabber came to fix it by introducing an open protocol, and Google started supporting it, and all was well. But when everybody was using Google Chat they severed the Jabber compatibility, locking everyone in to their platform. Now we're back wading around in enshittified shit and Jabber is dead.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Support matrix!! It already has international support, just needs to be a bit better with stickers and qol stuff. I've been using it for years. It's nice to know I don't have to worry about my privacy at all with chat rooms that can continue on without the original server.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People blame Google for the death of jabber because of one blog post from a disgruntled contributor but the truth is jabber was never popular and Google chat died as well.

Jabber was a mess, most of the clients were barely compatible with Each other and it was a wild west of feature support. Some clients were well featured with the ability to send richer messages, but typically only worked with a specific server and the same clients. Jabber did a crap job at making sure clients and servers interacted properly with each other and didn't push the standards quickly enough, forcing clients to do their own thing.

Which is all Google did, they went their own way because nobody used jabber and the interoperability was causing more harm than good. It didn't work, Google talk died and many years later clients like WhatsApp took over instead.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used that until they pay walled it. Then I found Pidgen I believe it was called. It was open source and could connect to pretty much every messenger and IRC and stuff. Then my friend just switched to texting lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Pidgin. Before that it was called Gaim.
It still works, as there are plugins to integrate it with almost everything.

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Trillian was definitely part of that war. I remember the daily patches to get things working again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I think the article mentions it. AOL tried to block it and this to and fro went 21 times before finally coming to a stop. MSN and Yahoo later signed a deal, I think, so that the former will work with latter's contacts properly.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It was very popular within my friends up until the skype merger. At that point they went "i aint usin skype lmao"

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Those were the days. 🥲

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Nudge

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

It was awesome. Especially paired with the msn messenger plus mod.

Near the end of its time and also when WiFi was taking off, I had friends with everyone in a uni house, but their WiFi was quite unreliable, so every hour or so I'd get 6 "person is online" pop up toasts appear simultaneously, stacked up on top of each other.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (3 children)

well, the same as the others really: Time.

I think once SMS and phone apps became the norm over having Messenger apps on our Desktops all the time, that was pretty much it for these applications over all. It was a long, slow death. But MSN was one of the firsts to call it quits if I recall right. Oddly the IM app I liked the most. It's just not many of my friends used it. They were all AIM/AOL users.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The one thing these messengers had over texts was presence notifications. I remember jumping through hoops to get aim working on my Motorola v188 so that I could be notified every time my crush came online and I could send her a “hey what’s going on”… only for it to be ignored.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I miss Adium, I used it for a bunch of protocols, and I customized the CSS/html to make it look really awesome.

I had an app called snakeskin or something to skin my Mac OS X to be dark themed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Wow, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (5 children)

I never knew anybody who used it. I had one contact on ICQ. Everybody else used AIM.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I was in highschool in the 2000s in Europe, and msn was our default way of communication with classmates.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yep, early 2000s in the UK and everyone was using MSN. I didn’t know a single person using AIM or ICQ!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I can see why AIM would be mostly an American phenomenon, given it was initially a feature specific to AOL. ICQ...I like to say I'm 10 minutes too young to have used ICQ, everybody who has wistful memories of it were like the seniors when I was a freshman. Yahoo! was the other one; the perpetual alsoran.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Ditto for us in Australia

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't even know what AIM is, everyone in Brazil was on ICQ and MSN, if you were a kid or teen you were on MSN, if you were an adult you were on ICQ.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think this is another one of those cases where the US does something different to the rest of the world: the majority of people were using msn messenger but the US was using aim.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

In the UK MSN was pretty ubiquitous.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Remember when icq could message aim users though? That was so badass.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago (6 children)

remember trillian? or pidgin was it called? you could message every service.

that was badass.

load more comments (6 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

No mentions of XMPP 😒

load more comments (2 replies)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Good old days.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The letters in bold spell "gold", just in case you didn't see it.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments