BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.

Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.

When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.

But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.

Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.

I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.