Empathy

~ the eulogy ~

A multi-protocol messenger solves a problem you only have if the people you talk to are scattered across several networks. In Turkey they were not scattered. They were on MSN, all of them, from 2002 until the thing folded, and a client that could also speak six other protocols was answering a shortage I never experienced.

Empathy appeared in 2007, written by Xavier Claessens as a front end for Telepathy. It did text chat and voice calls, and it spoke XMPP and MSNP natively, with IRC and SIP alongside them and a long tail of older networks reaching it through a libpurple bridge. GNOME adopted it as the default messenger in version 2.24 in september 2008. Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 both switched to it in 2009, displacing Pidgin.

For about four years that made Empathy the chat window most Linux users saw first. It was not the one most of them kept. Pidgin stayed one package install away and a lot of people made that install on day one, so Empathy's default status was more of a first impression than a monopoly.

Then the networks closed. Windows Live Messenger folded into Skype in 2013 and MSNP stopped being something you could implement. Google walked back XMPP federation for Hangouts across 2013 and 2014. Facebook shut its XMPP gateway in april 2015. AIM went in 2017. Empathy did not lose to a competitor, it lost its subject matter, and a client whose whole argument is that it speaks to everything cannot survive everything deciding to stop speaking.

~ the dossier ~

~ what telepathy was for ~

Telepathy was the more interesting half and almost nobody used it as intended. It was not a library you linked against. It was a set of separate processes talking over D-Bus, one connection manager per protocol, so that any program on the desktop could ask the system for presence or open a chat without knowing anything about the protocol underneath.

The idea was that your address book would show who was online, that a document editor could offer to collaborate with a contact, and that a game could invite a friend without shipping its own networking. Some of that was actually built. Almost none of it was picked up outside GNOME, and a framework with one real consumer is just an expensive way to write one application.

~ the default that arrived late ~

The timing is the sad part. Empathy became the standard Linux messenger in late 2008 and 2009, which is exactly the window when the open messaging web started closing. The years when a universal client would have been genuinely valuable were 2002 to 2006, when everybody had an MSN account and an ICQ number they had not deleted.

By the time it shipped as a default, the direction of travel was toward mobile apps with one network each, and toward companies that treated a third-party client as a leak rather than as a feature. Being handed to millions of desktops did not help. Distribution cannot save you from arriving at the end of an era.

~ the last tarball ~

There was one honest public warning. In april 2015, Allan Day wrote to the GNOME release team asking what to do about Empathy and Telepathy, noting that neither had received development time in a long while and that the Empathy experience was not good. Nobody disagreed. The core application set moved on without it.

Release 3.12.14 went out on 26 august 2017 and nothing followed it. The wiki page was moved into the Attic, where GNOME keeps things it is no longer pretending to maintain. Community software rarely gets a shutdown notice, because there is nobody whose job it is to write one. You find the date by looking for the last file anyone uploaded.

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