Hey. I’ve been working on a concept for a modern day IM client based on MSN Messenger for the better part of 4 years now, although progress was really made over the past year or two (This started off as nothing more than an HTML edit of the Skype website from 2012 recolored). I pretty much got fed up with modern “instant messenger” programs like Discord being cluttered with seemingly more and more advertisements and paywalls for features that were once free. I grew up as a kid seeing my family use MSN Messenger and eventually used Windows Live Messenger myself, even using MessengerReviver to the very end when Microsoft started to force users towards Skype. Seeing that Skype was shut down last year (during prototyping nonetheless), I felt a personal duty to work on my project as a sort of love letter to an important service of my life.
So with that being said… let me introduce Mocha!
Mocha is a brand new, modern instant messaging client and service made with modern .NET framework and Windows APIs. It was designed to be as lightweight and fast as possible while paying respect to the instant messenger that got a lot of us started. It is designed to look close to MSN Messenger 4 as I am able to (I’m currently the only person working on this), with features from classic versions of Messenger/Windows returning on the latest version of Windows. (screenshots are slightly old, sorry!)
The protocol Mocha uses the Mocha Enhanced Network Protocol (MENP) for real-time communication and supports Voice and Video Conversations. Other features of the client include free peer-to-peer file transfers between Contacts, Group Conversations with up to five Contacts (currently, can always be expanded in the future if needed), partial Add-In support with emoticons with plans to implement true client Add-Ins in the future, and simple built-in updater designed to be hassle-free. The protocol is completely unique to Mocha, and doesn’t take from other existing protocols although it is structured similarly to how MSNP was operated, with modern hashing and security standards. I don’t intend to open-source it at this time.
I have a website up based on MSN Messenger snapshots with corresponding pages with similar design languages from 2002, and a forum for discussions and support. At this point, I think I’ve done all I can realistically do by myself and would appreciate it if people can try out the software, give feedback, find bugs, and more importantly give important suggestions for Mocha. I am more than willing to hear people out and add cool ideas that I wouldn’t have otherwise; granted it doesn’t take away from the core function of Mocha. I’ve been posting dev-log type updates on a Discord server but I never really shared the link to it. It is setup for use as a community hub as well.
Mocha is currently in open beta and should be considered unstable in a production sense. Features may be incomplete, changed, or removed without notice. Bugs, crashes, compatibility issues, security issues, and data loss can happen at any time. The service may be interrupted unexpectedly at any time, with or without warning. The software shouldn’t be relied on 100% until the first full stable release. Think of it as literally an open-beta test program. Every installation prompts you with a pre-release message to inform you of such factors.
I think that’s all I have to say so far. If you want to check Mocha out, visit my website and give it a try. Also check out the Discord server and Forum for more information regarding Mocha. Let me know what you think about it. 