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Posted by SoKamil 3 hours ago

Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026(dzrh.com.ph)
https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger-app/804132271957789?...
72 points | 81 comments
zetalyrae 2 hours ago|
I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
gardnr 1 hour ago||
There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.

Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.

https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

zetalyrae 1 hour ago|||
I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.
alex1138 1 hour ago|||
Yeah but Facebook's 6 digit pin that they FORCED everyone on and severely disrupted messages and message history is totally a better system

Zuck deserves to be in prison along with other black hat hackers, this is just one of so many other things he's guilty of

LollipopYakuza 1 hour ago||
I don't understand your point. Do you mean he should go to prison for doing whatever he wants with his own product?
alex1138 1 hour ago||
Mark Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters (a Harvard newspaper) who were investigating him for Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg's company took people's API-facing emails that were in their profiles and replaced them with a facebook.com address. Mark Zuckerberg's company deleted years of his own correspondence. This in addition to things like Onavo

Yeah, I'm suggesting he go to prison for "doing whatever he wants"

CursedSilicon 39 minutes ago||
Do you have citations for these claims?

To be clear. They're a weird goal post move from "FORCED a 6 digit pin"

luke5441 1 hour ago|||
Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.

Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.

xnx 7 minutes ago|||
It's a miracle that we still have universally compatible email.
twolegs 2 hours ago|||
And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
MiddleEndian 1 hour ago|||
It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

anthk 49 minutes ago||
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
jpalepu 1 hour ago||||
Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.
techpression 50 minutes ago||||
Back when apps dared to have fun icons. I still smile when I open Cyberduck because of the hilarious icon (which is extremely well designed).
anthk 50 minutes ago|||
Same code in the background. Kopete for KDE could use Adium chat themes and emoticons.
dawnerd 2 hours ago|||
Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago|||
> you could keep your chat logs forever

Or delete them!

shantara 2 hours ago|||
I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
footy 49 minutes ago|||
I use Beeper now, but Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.
Gualdrapo 1 hour ago|||
I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.

"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".

shimman 1 hour ago|||
Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.
ale42 41 minutes ago||
Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.
someotherperson 2 hours ago|||
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).

[0] https://www.beeper.com/

varun_ch 2 hours ago||
I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).

I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.

RadiozRadioz 1 hour ago|||
It's still there! Gary and the team are hard at work on Pidgin 3
hacker_homie 2 hours ago|||
I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.

I miss it.

blell 41 minutes ago|||
GTK+ is only a native GUI toolkit in GNOME.
anthk 51 minutes ago||
From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.

You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.

neogodless 2 hours ago||
I'm one of those edge cases who uses Messenger.com a lot.

My facebook account is deactivated but I can keep on messaging. But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it).

So Mobile app would be my only option. Right now a lot of family members use Messenger, so it's not trivial to move away entirely.

teeray 22 minutes ago||
> But... facebook.com/messages requires you to log in to your facebook account (which reactivates it).

“…and you can see our facebook sign-ups during this past quarter were significant, showing how people are just clamoring for our AI offerings. With your investment, we can keep this going.”

kivle 1 hour ago|||
My account is deactivated in the sense that I have neither chosen to accept tracking or pay the monthly fee to use Facebook that us EU users had to chose between in that evil modal dialog. I instead stopped using Facebook.

So my account is in a strange limbo where Messenger still works, but I can't use Facebook itself without choosing one of the two evils. So this will definitely be the final nail in the coffin for my Facebook account.

The only question is, how will I request takeout of my data when I can't do anything in the app before answering in that modal, and also, how do I delete my account? I do NOT want to click accept to the tracking, and I refuse to pay for an app haven't even used for several years now.

coffeecoders 1 hour ago|||
Why not install just the Messenger app? I never install Facebook app, but I keep Messenger app to chat with my college peeps.
neogodless 1 hour ago|||
I'm a computer user. When I'm on a computer for work, or for fun, I prefer to be on my computer, and not stop and reach for a phone. I often have my phone in another room entirely. (On my main gaming PC, I use phone link to get texts on my computer as well!)

I also vastly prefer typing to the horrible swiping keyboard my phone uses. So for communicating via text, a computer is a much nicer solution, in my opinion.

simonsarris 1 hour ago|||
But that doesn't work for desktop (they already killed the messenger desktop app)
conk 1 hour ago|||
I think some in your situation will reactivate Facebook, which must be part of the decision to stop messenger.com.
iLoveOncall 1 hour ago|||
It's not a good solution, but you can use a mobile emulator on your desktop and use the mobile app there...
nozzlegear 1 hour ago||
Likewise not a good solution, but: I use the Mac's iPhone Mirroring to chat with family on Messenger throughout the day.
junglistguy 1 hour ago||
[dead]
hmokiguess 1 hour ago||
I wish we went back to communication protocols, and allowed people to bring their clients. mIRC was my favourite era of async communication, now it's all just a giant spaghetti of apps.
sccxy 1 hour ago||
Traffic to facebook.com must have dropped hard to make that kind of move.

It's strange to abandon the Messenger brand for such a reason.

I was similarly surprised when MS abandoned the MSN Messenger brand.

jinushaun 2 hours ago||
They really are forcing me to visit facebook.com in 2026 aren’t they? Guess I’ll stop using FB messenger when I’m on a computer.
RajT88 2 hours ago|
Which one lets them hoover up more data? Probably the desktop app.

Which one lets them display more ads? Probably the site.

For my money, I've always felt like they've tried to force me to use their messenger app on my phone. A while back, desktop/web started asking for a PIN to restore messages. It doesn't always prompt, and sometimes messages are there which you'd think shouldn't be, based on the description of E2EE and the role the PIN plays in it. I did not set any PIN, so I of course don't know it. Resetting the PIN deletes my entire message history.

ninininino 1 hour ago||
Which one lets them close off security loopholes scam farms use to automate scam messages and accounts? Probably getting rid of web and desktop.
burkaman 2 hours ago||
It looks like https://www.facebook.com/messages is effectively the same thing.
joecot 15 minutes ago||
When I'm trying to focus on something I have Messenger.com installed as a desktop app, so I can see when my friends message me without seeing a slew of FB notifications. facebook.com/messages has the notifications, there's no way to turn them off. This move feels like FB is trying to force me to choose between their engagement bait and seeing messages from my friends.
simlevesque 2 hours ago|||
yeah but messenger.com was nice if you've blocked the facebook.com domain to try to use less social media.
huhkerrf 2 hours ago|||
I imagine that's part of the motivation behind this decision.
burkaman 1 hour ago||||
For that I would recommend extensions like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/news-feed-era... which clear the endless feed but still let you visit the site for messaging. You can probably also use uBlock Origin to do this if you don't want to install anything new.
eleventyseven 2 hours ago||||
The blast radius is more corporate and school networks that block facebook.com
dylan604 2 hours ago|||
how many people willing to update their hosts file to redirect internally so that you are still able to avoid typing facebook.com? If someone was willing to block the domain, I'm guessing a high percentage of those would be amenable.
hackingonempty 2 hours ago||
Hopefully that means they are still using/supporting Rescript.
greatgib 53 minutes ago||
I'm so piss off by website like messenger, or google meet for example that try to force you to install their app on your phone when you just when to send a message or make a call on the web app.

Strangely it works very well in the browser, but they can't spy you as easily so they don't like that.

sombragris 34 minutes ago||
> Meta confirmed that users attempting to access messaging services via Messenger.com on desktop computers after the shutdown date will be automatically redirected to Facebook.com/messages to continue their conversations

So this is full circle. First it was like that (facebook.com/messages), then we were redirected to messenger.com. Now we're back to the beginning!

hbn 1 hour ago||
These days I only use FB Messenger for the small few number of friends who still use Facebook and send me videos on there. But the experience of watching videos sent to you is so incredibly clunky - Messenger itself apparently can't just play the video, it has to kick you into the Facebook app, so watching 3 videos someone sent involves 6 jumps between apps. And the player in the Facebook app seems broken, seemingly sometimes there's no scrub bar, or if there's supposed to be one it doesn't work.
swyx 1 hour ago|
> The Messenger desktop app for macOS and Windows had already been discontinued in December 2025, with Meta removing the apps from official stores and encouraging users to transition to web‑based messaging well before April 2026. This policy change reflects a broader strategic shift by Meta toward browser‑based and mobile messaging, rather than maintaining separate native desktop clients, which historically saw less usage compared to mobile versions.

interesting. do we see this move with coding agents as well? we're also seeing kind of the opposite move of the chat AI apps from web/terminal -> TO desktop apps

mathgladiator 1 hour ago|
for coding apps, I can see some silos happening, but I don't suspect it is realistic. For example, I'm vibing a mobile app and the binary is huge. I suspect there are too many use cases that will keep gravity towards the local machine. I also suspect that developers will not be tolerant to full remote dev environments.
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