alt Hacker NewsI remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
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Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.
Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.
And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.
> you could keep your chat logs forever
Or delete them!
I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.
"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).
I use Beeper now, but Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.
It's a miracle that we still have universally compatible email.
Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.
It's still there! Gary and the team are hard at work on Pidgin 3
I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.
I miss it.
GTK+ is only a native GUI toolkit in GNOME.
From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.
You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.
There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.
Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.
https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/