As someone who used to use multi-IM clients (Pidgin, Trillian, Meebo) back in the MSN/AIM/ICQ days, I have to say, it's surreal to see how the conversation has shifted to the point that this is now a reasonable-sounding comment.
Notably so, I believe Trillian was a paid product and Meebo was actually treated like a real tech startup. Interesting, indeed, how much the sentiment has shifted over the course of 10-15 years...
AFAIK the players like AIM, MSN, ICQ didn’t cut off access to third party clients.
Maybe they wanted to, but it was too onerous back then to force client software updates that they had to continue supporting reverse-engineered versions of the protocol?
They absolutely did. AOL in particular used a buffer overflow bug in AIM to execute arbitrary code to determine if the client was actually AIM or a third-party client pretending to be AIM.
MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM both cried foul about this and called out for interoperability, but then turned around and denied third-party clients access to their own networks once they got big enough.
Yeah, it's outright incredible how much even tech libertarian HN commonly visceraly HATES market competition and wants to outright remove the possibility of market alternatives for critical services.
I bet if HDMI and USB wouldn't exist, they'd protest against being able to connect their MacBooks to non-Apple TVs and non-Apple keyboards - to keep them safe from evil Samsung monitors and bad Logitech mice.
