If it still feels more democratic than modern chat apps then there is something deeply wrong with how things evolve.

That is correct but it was still more open than what we have now with the current services. 3rd party clients and multi-protocol messengers we don't have at all anymore.

Isn't that what Beeper or Ferdium are doing? And there's still libpurple/Pidgin.

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

[2] https://ferdium.org/

Interesting, need to check but so far the modern methods of multi protocol messaging was mostly just aggregating the web UIs of the various services in a single application (read: like a web browser)

Pidgin, Miranda, Adium are the things I was referring to - would be cool if I could use them for whatsapp, signal, gmail chat/hangouts but I don‘ think thats possible. Happy to get corrected here.

We're still hard at work trying to get support for new chat features in Pidgin. You can find our quarterly updates here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUmrAdJiXFMVZXy5DIrL8...

https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Pro... lists all of them.

You missed the point. The point wasn't the nature of the tool itself. Anyone could join, and one could chat with anyone. It was used "by the people" and not curated by corps.

ICQ was not "curated" by a corporation; it was produced and operated by one from scratch.

The present-day, mainstream, proprietary chat systems are open to anyone to join and chat with anyone.

Most of whatever restrictions they have are necessitated by spam. Allowing new members to immediately post unlimited amounts of material into any chat room or any other member's inbox is a bad idea, even in an open-source, federated chat system.

Curated referring to content.

Pretty sure every large-scale chat app that exists is used "by the people"? What are you actually trying to say?

Currently it's used "by the customer", or worse, "by the data suppliers".