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Most modern chat systems are entirely proprietary: proprietary clients, talking proprietary protocols to proprietary servers. There's no need for this: there are free open standards for one-to-one and one-to-many comms for precisely this sort of system, and some venerable clients are still a lot more capable than you might remember.

But as it is today, if you need to be on more than one chat system at once, the official way is to install their client app, meaning multiple clients or at best, multiple tabs open in your web browsers. Most of these "clients" are JavaScript web apps anyway, running inside Electron an embedded Chromium-based single-site browser. Which is fine, but Chrome is famously memory-hungry.

There is a brute-force way round this: have one app that embeds lots of separate Electron instances in tabs. There are a few of these around first came RamBox, followed by Franz. Both use the "freemium" model: there's a completely functional free client, plus subscriptions for extra features. If you prefer to avoid such things, both services have no-cost forks: Ferdi from Franz and Hamsket from RamBox. A newer rival still is Station.

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Korea gives Google and Apple another kick for requiring their own payment systems - The Register