Is there a way to see all of them in the same place?
You can bridge all of those services to Matrix.
Your operating system is software, and it seamlessly integrates everything you’ve mentioned! Sorry, I’m in a weird mood…
I am both shocked and appalled that not a single respondant has yet mentioned our infinitely extensible and glorious text editor, Emacs.
Only thing I’ve not looked into myself is Matrix. The big caveat with Emacs’ xmpp client currently, however, is a lack of encryption. There are a few different choices regarding email and irc clients for Emacs, though it does ship with both by default, if I recall.
There seems to be a Weechat plugin (normally a IRC client) for Emacs and there is a new xmpp module for Weechat that does e2ee via Omemo it seems. I never tried it so hard to say if that works, but it might.
Your browser
Thunderbird can do many of them
matrix bridges if you’re hosting your own homeserver.
Doable with XMPP, but a bit tricky to self host. The Jmp.chat / cheogram service does some of that though.
try ferdi, https://getferdi.com/
Yeah if you don’t want to bridge with matrix you can use ferdi/Franz or rambox/hamsket
As far as I can tell, there is no software that integrates multiple chat protocols and email. However, if you’re okay with having a separate email application, you may want to have a look at a multi-protocol messaging client like Pidgin or whatever it is that KDE uses these days (used to be Kopete and Telepathy).
EDIT: Scratch that. Kopete and Telepathy don’t have Matrix support. Pidgin still has it, though.
IRC is not only out of date and useless, but it is not like the others on the list. IRC doesn’t federate, it globulates. Each network is completely independent and there is a very high barrier to join any given network as a server. An IRC client might make sense but integration could only ever be minimal. There might be a draw if Freenode was still a thing but it’s not really, and honestly it is way past time for those projects to find a home on XMPP or matrix.
Calling irc ‘useless’ is a bit much. It’s not as popular as it once was but I’ve come into contact with (and keep in contact) with some very informed people courtesy of irc.
Libera Chat is Freenode in all but name and I’m a great fan of the culture there. The people are friendly and knowledgeable.
Less popular operating systems, for example 9front, don’t have Matrix or XMPP support (yet). Like e-mail or HTML over http, IRC serves as common denominator for communication. That said, I regard IRC like e-mail, insofar that it will not be replaced anytime soon despite glaring technical flaws and limitations. So, sign up today! :D
I mean… when it comes to public chatrooms, even if you federate, both the hosting and the control of the chatroom are centralized anyway, so the only benefit of federating is the “nice-to-have” convenience of not needing multiple accounts, which you can already get if you set up bridging anyway… so imho, an IRC channel with proper bridging covers all bases and allows cross-communicating with many different protocols. Since IRC is fairly simple it’d be relatively easy to bridge it with automatic or minimal steps for the user.
Personally, I think it’s 1-on-1 communication what makes federation (or p2p) be the most useful, or maybe private groups too, but federation in public groups isn’t really necessary. Imho, it makes more sense to solve the “multiple accounts” problem with specialized authentication services, and separate user management from content providers.
Exactly! Which is also why XMPP never really aimed to replaced IRC for public chat rooms and is strongest in 1:1 and private groups (and has an excellent gateway to join IRC channels).
I never really understood why Matrix made “everything” a group chat and basically started out as a glorified IRC bouncer. If those people behind old Freenode/Libera.chat were not so stuck in the past and held back IRC development a lot, then people would have definilty kept using modern IRC instead of switching to the buggy mess that is Matrix.
