[HN Gopher] Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client
___________________________________________________________________
Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client
Author : thunderbong
Score : 200 points
Date : 2022-03-25 14:49 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pidgin.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (pidgin.im)
| sequoia wrote:
| Q: What happened to Pidgin? A: Google & Facebook shut down their
| XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you
| can no longer use Pidgin to communicate with people on google &
| facebook. At least that was my experience.
|
| I used to use Pidgin with OTR[0] for e2e encrypted chat over
| google & facebook. It was pretty fantastic, messages were
| inaccessible to facebook and google even with a court order so I
| didn't need to trust them.
|
| Also used Finch for a bit[1]. For a time I had a pretty great
| setup on a local VM (running the PHP app I was working on): one
| tmux tab with work, another with a pane for finch (for chatting
| on FB & google), a pane for IRC, and a third pane for ttytter[2],
| the amazing twitter CLI. If someone nontechnical walked by they'd
| see a terminal and it looked exactly like I was working, not
| chatting on IRC & facebook, and looking at twitter :D
|
| 0: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ 1:
| https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-finch/ 2:
| https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Plus one for OTR. It was a bit awkward to do key exchange and
| validation but otherwise great once set.
| eimrine wrote:
| I love Pidgin. If I want a secure chat between 2 I will forse my
| buddy to go XMPP OTR
| zaik wrote:
| You should also checkout OMEMO which is based on the Signal
| protocol and allows things like group chat and sending messages
| to contacts who are offline.
| eimrine wrote:
| I have tried Matrix not on my wish but it has not worked.
| Also I like Tox but it needs processor with hardware
| cryptography and have not use it a long time.
| zaik wrote:
| OMEMO is an XMPP extension: https://omemo.top/
| anthk wrote:
| Bitlbee + libpurple has the best of both worlds.
| tuckerpo wrote:
| I used to work a little bit on Pidgin. A lot of the core
| maintainers have moved on. I think it's just grim (Gary Kramlich)
| at this point. It's very clean C if you're interested in
| contributing to an open source project.
| l72 wrote:
| I use pidgin daily with the libpurple-slack connector. It isn't
| super great for large rooms (I often keep Slack open in the
| background but have no notifications enabled), but it is really
| nice for direct messages, which is what mostly happens on slack
| in my company. Pidgin integrates nicely into gnome-shell's
| notifications, allowing me to quickly see messages and reply
| without losing focus.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| The lead maintainer of Pidgin (Gary Kramlich) frequently
| livestreams his work on Twitch.
|
| https://twitch.tv/rw_grim
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Weechat is pidgin for terminal. Check it out also if you pull
| together disparate systems.
| xnx wrote:
| Though it's often derided on HN, scree-scraping is the
| integration method that requires the list cooperation from the
| other party. I'd love to have something like Pidgin that ran
| stock copies of these messaging apps in their own virtual
| machines and aggregated the data.
| dybber wrote:
| Not necessary, new EU regulation forces them to make their
| messaging services interoperable:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30798850
| inops wrote:
| That will take years to be heeded, I'm sure. Even then, it's
| possible some companies will provide that access only to
| customers from the EU (given it removes the monopoly these
| companies hold on their services).
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Forces them to make them interoperable in Europe. I'm sure
| they'll drag their feet and then use some fuckery in the rest
| of the world to avoid it.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Is pidgin's Discord experience anything to write home about?
| forty wrote:
| Aaah I used it a long time ago, it was then called Gaim I
| believe.
|
| I also used the similarly named but jabber only Gajim.
|
| Good times :)
| [deleted]
| nocman wrote:
| Interesting, I did not remember that it was once called Gaim.
| dmead wrote:
| it was for sure called gaim. one of the only usable aim
| clients that worked on linux in the 90s.
| chipx86 wrote:
| Indeed. Originally it was "GAIM" (due to the original purpose
| being a GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger client), which AOL wasn't
| thrilled about. We changed it to "Gaim", which I think they had
| less of a problem with, or at least we had hoped they would.
|
| Internally at least, we called it "Gaim's An Instant
| Messenger". I'm not sure if we formalized that or not. It's
| been too long.
|
| And then to fully move away from that branding situation, it
| was renamed to Pidgin. This was mid-2000s, after I moved away
| from the project, so I don't have any insight into the name
| change beyond the history.
|
| Good times for sure!
| khc wrote:
| Hi chipx86! I remember "Gaim's An Instant Messenger" used to
| be on the old website but either google or my memory is
| failing me.
| somethingsome wrote:
| The plugin to connect Pidgin and Meta/Facebook messenger is
| dying. I think Pidgin may lose a lot of users if this in not
| solved.
|
| If someone want to help them :
|
| - https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526
|
| - https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/518
| greatquux wrote:
| yeah, i do hope someone can do this. unfortunately i cannot but
| it is awesome.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| I did pidgin and before that Trillian, Miranda and Disgby.
|
| It would be great to see an integrated chat app.
|
| For me Telegram is the king of today's UI, hence, it would be
| amazing to see them integrating Skype (still using it) and
| whatsapp. Line and wechat integration would also be super.
|
| This new European law that is about being passed gives me hope.
| mdasen wrote:
| I really miss Adium (https://adium.im) which was based on
| Pidgin's libpurple. Adium had such a great user experience. It
| was built with native widgets and also incorporated chat themes
| that were implemented using WebKit's rendering (https://www.adium
| xtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...). It was fast and
| memory friendly given that it was a native app and the themes
| were just small templates offering a different rendering style
| (rather than the entire app being a huge JS/HTML/CSS React app).
|
| There were add-ons for message styles, contact list styles, dock
| icons, sounds, and more.
|
| It's really sad that we've lost the ability to connect to so many
| of the services we use with third party clients. Instead, I now
| have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Signal all
| running and taking up space in my dock.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| There also used to be plugins for iChat (which later became
| Messages) that added support for MSN Messenger, making for a
| no-fuss nicely streamlined chat experience across a decent
| range of networks (AIM, XMPP/Gchat, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN
| Messenger).
|
| So between modded iChat and Adium, on Mac OS you had the choice
| between minimal and kitchen-sink style IM clients, both of
| which were free and had no ads. OS X had also hit peak
| refinement around that time, between 10.2 and 10.6. It was a
| brief but golden age for Mac users with a lot of IM friends.
| fumar wrote:
| How did I forget about iChat? That brings back memories. Mac
| 10.4 to 10.6 was glorious. The walled gardens got higher and
| less fun over the 2010's. Discord works but I am probably one
| generation too old to appreciate the meme-heavy communication
| style.
| eddieroger wrote:
| iChat had multi-party video calls and virtual backgrounds
| in 2008. It blows my mind when Apple talks about multi-
| party FaceTime calls like it's a new feature.
| lopis wrote:
| We had actual video phone calls in 2005, and with the
| advent of Smartphones they were essentially deprecated.
| Eventually, Smartphones became capable of making video
| calls over the Internet with 3G
| hans1729 wrote:
| > Instead, I now have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage,
| Discord, and Signal all running and taking up space in my dock.
|
| Why don't you use a matrix client with bridges? I use telegram,
| WhatsApp and signal over Element. The bridges are not as great
| as the individual clients, but it's definitely miles ahead of
| using five messaging apps.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Honest question: when registering for those bridges is it
| just as simple as putting in your username/password or do you
| have to do other gyrations to make it work? Do you have to
| upgrade continually to avoid the services playing whack-a-
| mole with your bridges?
|
| I ask because I'd like to set up Matrix bridges like that
| locally, but if I have to create a Discord bot account or
| fish out an API key then that's asking a bit much.
| olah_1 wrote:
| i think both Element matrix services and Beeper both offer
| this as a service now
| mdasen wrote:
| Maybe I'll look into it more, but it feels messy and
| complicated at first glance. Portal rooms, plumbed rooms,
| bridgebot bridges, Bot-API bridges, puppeted bridges, double-
| puppeted bridges, server-to-server briding, and sidecar
| bridges. I haven't used it so some of this may be wrong and
| I'm happy to accept corrections.
|
| It seems like a puppeted bridge requires me to send the
| messages to the Matrix server who then has a login to my FB
| Messenger to read/write messages there. I'm not going to run
| my own Matrix server so that requires me to trust a Matrix
| server with access to my Facebook.
|
| Yes, downloaded apps can be malware, but it's a lot more
| easily discoverable. One can use tools like Wireshark to
| confirm where data is going. If apps are open source, one can
| see the source code and even compile one's self. Even if you
| don't trust the maintainer who is compiling, you still have a
| good idea that they're not sending all your messages to them
| because someone is more likely to notice the binary doing
| that (via tools like Wireshark). When software is just run on
| a server that the public doesn't have access to, who knows
| what is happening. Yes, running on your machine doesn't mean
| everything is safe, but there's some level of inspection you
| can do of what is going on.
|
| I don't want to sound too down on Matrix, but it feels a bit
| off to me. It feels like people who want a decentralized
| future...where everyone is centralized into a small number of
| servers who can run a dozen or so Docker containers and such.
| Maybe that's the way the world needs to be given where we're
| at, but I just miss having a client that could login to
| multiple chat services.
|
| If these puppeted bridges can exist, why can't my client just
| puppet directly? Why send the message to the matrix server
| for the matrix server to then call the Facebook API? I
| remember the days of AIM breaking the OSCAR protocol and
| libpurple/libgaim needing to catch up so I understand that
| pushing out an update to client software might mean some
| extra hiccups in the connectivity. Still, it feels like the
| servers might not be able to update their software much
| faster than I am able to. Maybe App Store approvals holding
| up updates is the issue? Is the issue that app stores could
| block a Matrix + bridges client since it's clearly trying to
| access services that don't want third-party access, but a
| Matrix client that's just talking to a Metrix server is fine
| - and then the "infraction" is on a server that the App Store
| doesn't get a say over? (I'm not saying that I think it
| should be disallowed, but I could see companies disliking it)
|
| Is the issue that people want to write these bridges in
| JavaScript, Python, and other languages which are all fine if
| you're running a bunch of Docker containers on a server, but
| might not work so well if you're trying to create a desktop
| or mobile app?
|
| Why can Matrix bridge these things, but we can't have a
| libpurple that works as well as these bridges? Or maybe I
| just haven't used libpurple in a long time and it's actually
| still good and I should re-try it.
|
| It feels like Matrix wants to be a decentralizing force, but
| then the bridges force me to centralize my messaging through
| one of their servers. Again, maybe that's the way it needs to
| be for reasons, but it just doesn't feel like what I've been
| looking for.
| kevincox wrote:
| You don't need to know most of those things to get started,
| in general you can just follow the setup instructions for
| the services you use.
|
| You do need your own homeserver, but for me I run a
| homeserver just for the bridges, and have my main account
| on a third-party homeserver. This way at least my native
| matrix chats (which are far more important to me) don't
| depend on my home server being online.
|
| I would subscribe to hosted bridges fairly quickly if they
| were a reasonable price. Maybe $1/month per service?
| Obviously there is risk here because you are trusting
| someone with access to your account but to me it is
| probably worth it. There is https://www.beeper.com/ but you
| need to move your primary account to their service, which
| is just too much disruption and lock-in for me.
|
| TL;DR I agree, self-hosting is a bit much. I'd love to be
| able to pay for it though.
|
| I thought about hosting that service myself but I wouldn't
| want to run a service that is both against the
| dependencies' ToS and is playing cat-and-mouse with their
| attempts to shake you off. Too much excitement for too
| little reward.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Maybe that's the way the world needs to be given where
| we're at, but I just miss having a client that could login
| to multiple chat services.
|
| I'd be very curious to know if the work on P2P Matrix
| servers is going to include some level of support for
| client-side bridges?
|
| I know the P2P work and bridging aren't quite the same
| thing, but it seems like the two are vaguely related: if
| you've got a bridge running, I suspect that would have a
| lot of the same concerns as running a Matrix server
| locally. And I get that for some clients like iMessage,
| your bridge has to be running on a Mac, but that isn't the
| case for most other messaging platforms, is it?
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I tried matrix bridged to IRC (libera) a while ago. It didn't
| sync back to matrix properly when people on irc left the
| channel, so you'd try to talk to someone on irc who wasn't
| there anymore. One time, a person on irc couldn't see any
| messages by any matrix users until they reconnected to the
| Network. And IRC is an old, open, well understood protocol. I
| just cannot imagine that a bridge to eg Whatsapp would result
| in anything even remotely usable.
| kevincox wrote:
| To be fair your first problem sounds like an impedance
| mismatch more than anything else. Users come and go from
| IRC all the time because connections are transient by
| nature. It would probably be annoying to a lot of people if
| they left the room every time they disconnected.
|
| Matrix and WhatsApp are both durable with regards to users
| so this issue probably isn't relevant.
|
| Personally I find the biggest problem with puppeting is the
| impedance mismatches. For example if reactions aren't
| bridged it can be easy to miss stuff. This depends on the
| bridge used.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There's still third party clients. I use Ferdi, which is the
| open-source equivalent to Franz and Rambox.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The ironic thing is the protocols are now almost all dirt
| simple but I perceive the risk of being C&D'd for making
| alternative clients to not be worth the risk.
| Kye wrote:
| AOL definitely took issue with gaim, which was Pidgin's old
| name from when it was mainly an AIM client.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu.
| ..
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yeah the days of integrated chat messengers seem to be dead. I
| loved Trillian way back when and all of the UI customization
| options.
| xenophonf wrote:
| Does Adium not compile on newer versions of macOS? Development
| appears to have slowed down, but it doesn't look completely
| abandoned. I might try to feed it to Xcode on my hackintosh if
| only to see what kinds of errors crop up.
|
| That said, I've switched back to terminal-based IRC clients, so
| I haven't run either Pidgin or Adium in probably 10 years. It's
| sad. Both were really good tools.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Honestly, it's mostly a matter of Adium having lost its
| purpose. Most of the IM networks it originally interacted
| with no longer exist or are no longer open to third-party
| clients, and the ones that remain (mostly XMPP and IRC)
| aren't necessarily a great fit for Adium.
| pjerem wrote:
| I've been surprised recently by the availability of plugins
| for libpurple (the lib on which Adium is based) which
| supports Telegram, Signal, Facebook ...
| duskwuff wrote:
| Modern IM networks aren't a great fit for libpurple
| because they fundamentally work differently.
|
| "Old-school" IM networks like AIM were simple to work
| with from a client perspective -- you connect to the
| network, you send and receive messages, and that's it.
| There was no real support for server-side message
| history, multiple clients, mobile clients, or offline
| messaging, so third-party clients often just implemented
| their own local history instead.
|
| Newer IM networks like Telegram are usually designed from
| a mobile-first perspective -- the Telegram client
| protocol is designed around the concept that the server
| has a definitive view of history across all chats, and
| the client synchronizes portions of that history to local
| storage to display it. It certainly isn't impossible to
| adapt this to a design like libpurple/Adium/etc, but it's
| an awkward fit and is likely to fail to support features
| which don't fit into that model, like chat messages being
| edited or deleted by the other party in the conversation.
| vanshlanger wrote:
| definitely used Adium when I had a white macbook
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I'd love to see what Adium's interface actually looked like,
| but apparently the website does not believe in screenshots. :(
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| One of the non-obvious parts of Adium's interface from the
| screenshots was that it integrated with Mac OS's calendar
| app, so I could have a contact "John Smith" and enter his AIM
| name, his Yahoo name, etc and they'd all show up as "John
| Smith" and be collapsed into one entry in your contact list.
|
| On top of that, Adium is/was also incredibly themable. You
| could use independent Adium Xtra addons for both your contact
| list and your chats. I had a theme so that all messages just
| appeared sequentially like so:
|
| [Hello][Hello][What's Up?][Etc.]
|
| where mine were red and the person I was talking to was in
| blue (or vice versa, it's been awhile). You could see so many
| messages at once.
|
| Adium is the application I miss most from MacOS, although I
| imagine I'd still miss it even if I were still using a Mac.
| With the exception of the addition of multi-device continuous
| chat history, we've really regressed in the category of
| instant messaging since the days of multi-chat clients.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I'm using a Mac and I definitely miss Adium.
| lproven wrote:
| Er... does this help?
|
| https://adium.im/screenshots/
|
| I still have it installed. It was very useful in the PowerPC
| era.
|
| Pidgin still is useful: it talks to a whole bunch of services
| that are still alive... IRC, Telegram, Skype, Google
| Hangouts, Slack, Rocket.chat, XMPP, ICQ, etc.
|
| Sadly Adium can't use Pidgin or Libpurple plugins directly.
| This severely reduces its usefulness today.
| mdasen wrote:
| The website isn't well maintained anymore since we've kinda
| passed the days that people used multi-service clients. Here
| are some screenshots:
|
| https://www.adium.im/screenshots/images/overview.jpg
|
| The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via WebKit
| and you can change the theme easily. The Contacts list is
| also HTML in the middle so that's all theme-able too.
|
| https://images.six.betanews.com/screenshots/1110403338-1.jpg
|
| Here's a Contacts list that's more compact and a chat window
| without the top toolbar.
|
| https://adium.im/screenshots/images/overvieworange.jpg
|
| Here's a more radical theming where they've gotten rid of the
| window around the contact list so it's floating.
|
| If you go through the Adium Xtras, you can see all sorts of
| chat (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&
| sort=...), contact list (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php
| ?a=cats&cat_id=4&sort=do...), and other ways of styling
| Adium.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via
| WebKit and you can change the theme easily
|
| KDE's Kopete (and after that, the now defunct KDE
| Telepathy) could that too. Maybe GNOME's Empathy client
| could that too. I agree all of that was really cool.
|
| I sorely miss those all-in-one messengers completely
| integrated to the desktop.
| dmacvicar wrote:
| In Kopete we even had Latex rendering plugins and auto-
| away plugins using motion detection :-)
|
| (I started that project decades ago and still grateful to
| it, as it was the start of my career in tech)
| bergie wrote:
| The messaging app on the Nokia N900 was also based on
| libpurple. You had all of your Google Talk and Skype contacts
| and chats, together with SMS in a single place.
| wjt wrote:
| It was based on Telepathy https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/.
| None of the built-in backends for XMPP, SIP, Skype and
| cellular calls used libpurple. (A libpurple-based backend
| could be installed from the community app repo.)
| lousken wrote:
| After ICQ and QIP, Trillian was the way to go for me.
| Unfortunately the inability to use facebook without being
| constantly banned forced me to switch to Element. And while
| Element and Matrix is cool, it still doesn't come close to
| Trillian. Emotes are not customizable, theming is harder, and the
| amount of things u can do with history is endless compared to
| Element. Overall I feel like Element is more like Teams and
| missing features for power users. The search functionality and
| working with many attachments in element is very tedious, no way
| to search in them, sort them, filter them... I hope they can
| improve on that, I have over 500k messages and history feels
| useless thanks to that.
| shashurup wrote:
| I definitely liked it, however, since whatsapp, telegram, slack
| etc had joined the game with mostly proprietary protocols it
| looks like it just has no chance to catch up and it is very sad -
| I find the ability to choose a client quite important.
|
| P.S. I have even written a plugin for - quickpurple
| __del__ wrote:
| protocols like aim's oscar were proprietary. it's the legal and
| business landscape that's changed.
| ganzuul wrote:
| I could never come to terms with the tattered and worn user
| interface experience for an application that is so prominent on
| the desktop. Perhaps the widget system is glamorous underneath,
| but to accomplish its job of getting out of the way of
| functionality... I can feel the RSI acting up from the time when
| Pidgin was my only option.
|
| Thanks for what you did, no thanks for repeat business.
| millzlane wrote:
| I grew up using windows running the "classic" interface. It's
| really no different from any other GTK based app.
| vanshlanger wrote:
| Damn I used to use pidgin like 15 years ago, can't believe
| they're still around!
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Why not Matrix with bridges?
| zaik wrote:
| Bridges require you to forfeit your credentials to your
| homeserver and break E2EE.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| But surely if it was worth protecting then you would be
| having that conversation on Matrix in the first place rather
| than Facebook Messenger?
| zaik wrote:
| I mostly use XMPP for secure communication. Sadly, Matrix
| does not built upon the XMPP standard and reinvents another
| incompatible E2EE chat protocol.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I had really mixed experiences with the various Matrix bridges
| the last time I tried this. I might have to take another crack
| at it, though, to see if it's gotten any better.
|
| Though, honestly, now that most people I know are on Signal,
| the only other messenger platform I care about is Slack, and
| given that's just for work, I'm not sure I care anymore...
| anta40 wrote:
| I'm a heavy Pidgin user during undergraduate days (2006-2010),
| when Yahoo Messenger was still really popular.
|
| Thanks to Pidgin Portable, simply copied the zipped folder to the
| USB flashdisk, visit any computer lab then I can YM'ed my
| friends. Good old days :)
| valbaca wrote:
| oh pidgin. Throughout my life (as a millennial) chat went this
| way:
|
| 1. IRC
|
| 2. IRC, Yahoo messenger, Aol Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger
| (mostly based on your ISP in the early days)
|
| 3. All + Skype (video!! wow!) + Google messenger. *This was when
| pidgin was invaluable* (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)
|
| 4. Skype started charging and since everyone was on Facebook,
| everyone moved to Facebook messenger. Text messages also became
| free, so for instant comms you just texted people.
|
| 5. Slowly FB Messenger took precedence over even text messages as
| data plans became better
|
| 6. A decade passes...
|
| 7. The exodus off of Facebook begins and Discord takes over as a
| way to talk to your group of friends.
| jitix wrote:
| As an Indian millennial, my journey was a bit different:
|
| 1. Yahoo messenger (2001/2 - First internet experience)
|
| 2. Yahoo messenger + Text (2003/4)
|
| 3. Text + Skype (2006/7)
|
| 4. Whatsapp + FB Messenger + Skype (2010)
|
| 5. Whatsapp/iMessage + Instagram (2016/17)
| sidpatil wrote:
| > (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)
|
| I believe you're referring to Adium [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adium
| pacbard wrote:
| > there was also some Duck app for macOS?
|
| You are thinking of Adium (https://adium.im). I believe it was
| a port of pidgin/libpurple to cocoa/aqua (or whatever the macOS
| gui framework was back then).
| mattwad wrote:
| What no ICQ? I got off the train before FB Messenger,
| personally. I don't think it was 'required' to have an app
| anymore once texting became free. And now everyone's on
| iMessage, except for Android users like me.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Don't forget Trillian!
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I still use it. But all it is good for anymore is a google
| chat/hangouts desktop app. It was nice gluing all of them
| together like pidgin.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Woah! My Trillian-lover friend also used KVirc quite a lot.
| Actually, not sure it was called KVirc, but something like
| that.
| klvino wrote:
| Would probably include ICQ in the list for #2
| dijit wrote:
| Similar.
|
| 1. IRC
|
| 2. ICQ
|
| 3. MSN
|
| 4. IRC (again)
|
| 5. Skype and Facebook
|
| 6. WhatsApp
|
| 7. Facebook again
|
| 8. Still Facebook (very sticky)
|
| 9. IRC + Slack (some communities) + Discord (some communities)
| + Facebook/Whatsapp + Signal + Telegram + Matrix + Zulip
|
| Yeah, I think we need a new libpurple.
| snvzz wrote:
| Before: IRC + XMPP.
|
| Today: IRC + Matrix.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Part of the lack of 'new libpurple' is that companies have
| grown much more adept at/focused on removing third party
| clients. Discord in particular, IIRC, will even ban users for
| using third party clients.
| chipx86 wrote:
| This was a problem even back when Gaim (now Pidgin) was at
| peak popularity.
|
| I used to be a dev on the team, and we had our accounts
| banned all the time. Some of the IM services didn't mind us
| being there (MSN seemed more than fine with it, and we
| reportedly had fans within the team there, though future
| protocol versions made it harder for us to figure out).
|
| Yahoo wanted us off and did everything they could to keep
| us from connecting. Changing auth schemes to increasingly-
| elaborate obfuscated methods, at one point throwing pages
| of what looked like equations at us.
|
| AIM would have been fine with us if we had used TOC (their
| open source protocol), but OSCAR is where all the features
| were at. They didn't outright ban clients, but my
| understanding is that their lawyers were involved at one
| point (though I think mainly due to the name "GAIM").
|
| But you're right, they are removing third-party clients
| more. And fewer protocols are unencrypted plain text, which
| makes it harder as well. Still, work continues.
| tjader wrote:
| I've been using Matrix + bridges to fill that gap. I use IRC,
| Telegram, Google Chat, Discord and WhatsApp all via bridges,
| so I only have to interact with a single interface and all my
| chats are in the same place.
|
| Before that I used first Trillian, then Pidgin. Then seeking
| persistence across clients I started using bitlbee to access
| everything through IRC, but that really sucked for media-
| heavy things like Telegram. My current setup of my own Matrix
| homeserver + bridges has been working great and feels way
| more liberating than using 6 different apps.
| kurisufag wrote:
| this, but I bridged them all to IRC by custom means, which
| is the easiest to implement and allows people on all
| platforms to talk in the same channel-equivalent. the media
| issue is solved by using a more modern client that can
| generate embeds (e.g. glowing-bear for weechat-relay).
| tjader wrote:
| Do you manage to get pictures, audio messages, videos and
| reactions to work well in both directions with that
| setup?
|
| Also, I use this for personal messages as well as group
| chats. The people I interact with don't even know I am
| not using the native client.
| spennant wrote:
| I started with Talk -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) But I guess
| that's because I'm Gen-X
| mxuribe wrote:
| Thank you! I remember that I had started on a chat system
| right before IRC, but could not for the life of me remember
| its name; though i knew that it was a simple name. Talk was
| the first thing that i started on, but once i learned that
| IRC allowed me to connect with folks around the world (at
| the time, Talk was limited to the single unix server that
| users were connected to, though that constraint was
| expanded beyond that later on if i recall correctly). Man,
| i remember those early days; what fun to marvel at chatting
| with others either across the university campus or - later
| on - across the world!
| Agamus wrote:
| My path, which began in 1997:
|
| 1. IRC
| k__ wrote:
| Haha, nice.
|
| My journey was:
|
| 1. ICQ, because my gamer friends used it.
|
| 2. Added IRC, while it felt already outdated, somehow a bunch
| of my Japan-nerd friends used it.
|
| 3. Added AIM, YIM, MSN, because girls and my parents used them.
|
| 4. Switched to Trillian, because it wasn't managable otherwise.
|
| 5. Everyone moved to Facebook Messenger.
|
| 6. Everyone moved to WhatsApp
|
| 7. Now and then some friends switch to Signal, Telegram, or
| another "secure," alternative to WhatsApp.
|
| 8. Started working remote and everything is Slack and Zoom.
|
| 9. Dabbled in Web3/crypto and everything is Discord
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Stage 2 evokes warm memories. The clients were featureful
| enough but very far from being resource hogs. The UIs were
| workable and hid plenty of options in their menus.
|
| The webcam features on MSN messenger landed at the same time as
| broadband internet became widespread in my country, when I was
| at school, so everyone was in on the novelty.
|
| Some of it is certainly the cynicism of age and work life, but
| I'm certain something has been lost since then. The UI, the
| nudges, the winks, the games, the chaotic friend lists were all
| magic in a way that FB, WA, Slack, Teams, Discord, et al
| aren't.
| egman_ekki wrote:
| 1. Odigo & web based chats
|
| 2. ICQ
|
| 3. Trillian & QIP, mostly to connect to ICQ
|
| 4. Facebook chat
|
| 5. Google Hangouts, Allo, gmail chat
|
| 6. Back to Facebook Messenger because all my contacts use it,
| Slack for work
| madrox wrote:
| I'm the proud owner of a six digit ICQ number. What a time that
| was.
|
| It's funny. Having a similar trajectory of chat clients, I'd
| say my migration in my teens was dictated by "which service
| were the girls I wanted to talk to using?" In my 20s it was
| "what preserved my session as I ran around town and logged into
| various dumb terminals" until finally "what worked best on
| mobile."
|
| Now that I'm married in my 40s, it's "which service are the
| guys I want to talk to using?"
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| GTalk - you could install it without admin and it was blazing
| fast.
| qiskit wrote:
| No icq? There was a time when the first thing you installed on
| your computer was instant messaging applications. It's how you
| kept in touch with friends online. Crazy how quickly it fell
| off.
| ValtteriL wrote:
| Pidgin has been a trusty XMPP client. Staff at one of my previous
| employers used it for IRC.
|
| Interestingly, some actors are willing to buy exploits against
| Pidgin users for sums higher than what the authors have made out
| of it.[0]
|
| [0] https://therecord.media/zerodium-acquiring-zero-days-in-
| pidg...
| millzlane wrote:
| Great app. But development was hostile to new users willing to
| help report bugs. It was then I learned of the "if you can't fix
| it, then don't complain" crowd of OSS.
| tomfast wrote:
| Still universal!
| UltraViolence wrote:
| greatquux wrote:
| I still use Pidgin for XMPP and the increasingly-unreliable-
| Facebook-Messenger plugin, along with a Gnome extension that
| allows me to reply directly to chat popups from the notification
| no matter what virtual desktop I'm on. I really can't get that
| combination anywhere else in fact and I hope it never stops
| working. :)
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