I like chatting with my friends—who doesn’t?—but I don’t always know where to find them. There are simply too many apps.

Some of my friends text, others use WhatsApp, while others yet insist on using Discord or the DM feature in whatever random social network they prefer. It’s a mess, and it can mean keeping several tabs open all day just to keep the conversations flowing. It makes you wish some application could combine all of your conversations into one place.

This is a dream that used to be reality. Applications like Trillian, Pidgin, and Adium all combined instant messaging services like AIM, MSN, and ICQ in one handy interface. Over time, though, messaging services got more protective of their APIs, and these sorts of all-in-one portals slowly stopped working.

The dream, it seems,

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