If you're like me, you appreciate the fact that there are no
push-notification and social media messages while using System 7.
It puts you back in control of things. However, every once in a
while it is nice to chat with friends or family. While System 7
isn't able to fight the JavaScript battles on facebook.com, it
certainly is ready for Instant Messenging. How so, you ask?

All you need is an IRC client and an account with the service of
your choice. The official Macintosh Garden IM Gateway will bring
both worlds together. Currently supported are: Facebook chat,
Discord, Jabber, Twitter and Telegram. Start the IRC client of
your choice. I'm using MacIRC in this example but every other IRC
client should work too.


*Where your client asks for connection details, enter
chat.macintoshgarden.org as the server name.

*Pick a user / nickname too. You can leave password or realname
alone for now. Connect!

*You'll be greeted by the &bitlbee server. That's the server that
will handle the communication with e.g. facebook for you.

*Now type register {password} to sign up, where password is the
one you'd like to use.

*On later returns, use identify {password} to log back in

*Now add the service you'd like to use. We use Facebook Chat for
that. Type account add facebook {email} {password} (where email
is the email you registered with Facebook and the password for
your Facebook account)

*We need to adjust a setting for Facebook Chat (or any other
plugin you choose) to use "pretty" names in the userlist instead
of just ID's. Type account facebook set nick_format %full_name

*To connect to Facebook, simply type account facebook on

*It should connect to the server now. In case you typed your
password wrong and want to unregister, you can also delete the
account by using account facebook del and start over again.

*Wanna send someone from your contact list a message? Type /msg
{username} {messagetext}. Example: /msg JohnDoe Hi, how is it
going?



Note: Your chat about last week's Football game is not encrypted.
If that makes you uncomfortable, please do not use this service.
This service is provided by System 7 Today's co-admin Knezzen.
He's the only one with access to it, and unlike the NSA, he does
not read any of your messages. Give it a spin.

Happy Instant Messaging on your System 7 hardware!



P.S. For those of you who'd like to use Discord, Steven from
Mac84.net (http://retro.mac84.net) made a tutorial. Watch it as a
Quicktime movie on Cornica.org (http://www.cornica.org).