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Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

pidgin.im

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Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#111
post #49

Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.

I used Miranda - seems likes its getting developed

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#112
post #49

Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.

Does not everyone still use it? I and most of my friends do. They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890

What chat protocol do you use it with?

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does not everyone still use it? I and most of my friends do. They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890

I finally stopped using it when Google Chat[0] went away. [0] Not that Google Chat, the other one.

Google Talk*

There was no product named Google Chat until recently.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#114
I used to love using Pidgin to aggregate all of my chat clients into one UX. These days with most of the platforms I use running on proprietary protocols I'm too worried about getting my accounts banned for using questionable clients built by reverse-engineering these protocols. I've heard enough Google Account horror stories that it doesn't seem worth the risk.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#115
While I really like Pidgin, I really wish their developer reference for plugins were a bit easier to work with/understand.

The only thing I find is here: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/CHowTo (Their new website https://pidgin.im/development/ has nothing on making plugins)

But it does not explain things like How to create new chats/IMs, how to create new buddies, what the Buddy List is (Which I found out, the buddy list https://docs.pidgin.im/pidgin/2.x.y/blist_8h.html is NOT a list of buddies that you have, but is a list of things like all of your chats, a list of buddies, and some other things I have yet to figure out, and this is needed for libpurple to understand what chats you do and don't have).

They explain what their APIs do, but I have been typically finding it much easier to look though Matrix's libpurple plugin (or some of the more established plugins) to figure out how they do things like make a new chat room, add buddies, etc.

Perhaps it is also because I have only been looking through others code, but I feel like the APIs are a bit on the limited side (Like trying to add two pictures and text in a single chat, for example. Do I send two files then make text? do I add one picture at a time?).

I hate to say, it makes it really hard to try to make/support/extend plugins.

(For those curious, I have been working to add MMS support to libpurple: https://source.puri.sm/kop316/purple-mm-sms , so that the Pinephone can have MMS support).

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#116

Two days ago Beeper, a (almost?) universal chat app, was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278

I'd say the thing that makes Pidgin more attractive is the fact it's free, whereas Beeper is $10/mo (unless you host the entire stack yourself, and at that point you can't use the Beeper app). Granted, Beeper has mobile apps going for it.

Pidgin is basically dead. When all the big messengers closed off their protocols, keeping compatibility became very labor intensive. It doesn't look like any FOSS has been able to do it, so I'm optimistic about Beeper.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#117
post #49

Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.

And GAIM was based on Gamera, the official AOL Linux client.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#118
post #38

Considering this is open source (which I'm assuming includes the plugins), wouldn't this be a much better alternative to the native apps on mobile? Curious as to why this hasn't been ported to Android/iOS. I'd much prefer this over apps that need permission to my blood type to function. Pidgin was great back in the day for convenience, but there is a legitimate argument to be made for privacy here too. EDIT: It just…

iOS applications aren't allowed to stay awake constantly talking to a bunch of different network services. For iOS IM to work, a centralized server (and corresponding developer ID) has to send a notification to you, sent first to Apple to be proxied via Apple's push notification service (APNS) to which each iOS device maintains a persistent connection. This means that some third party service has to know when you get…

You can create local notifications any time your app is active, which includes the background. AFAIK signal does empty APNS push to wake and then pulls data with it's own connection and then displays text content with a local notification.

The main reason for the restriction to apple-only for notification services is battery life, and they've been proven right by bad behavior demonstrated on android.

Interestingly, if your a VOIP app you can actually circumvent a lot of the background networking restrictions, but it's still hard to do when you don't have an active call in place. You also have to be an actual VOIP app to get approved with that entitlement. Which wouldn't be hard to get approval for if you made a fork of signal for example, since it does have real VOIP capabilities inside.

Either way the battery life of your device would be worse with your custom VOIP app always keeping a connection open vs. apple's native OS notification system.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#119

Still using it as my Hangouts client via ye-olde GTalk plugin, even though I thought Google had stopped supporting it. I've debated several times switching over to the purple-hangouts plugin so that I can get proper groupchat support, but the last time I tried it wanted me to do some shady-looking stuff with signing into Google and using the Developer Tools to grab the authentication key.

They're killing Hangouts soon, so this is probably moot anyway.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#120

Adium ( https://adium.im/ ) used to be the MacOSX native version (port) of Pidgin. It seems they still recommend it. However, Adium seems kind of dead? Last commit ( https://github.com/adium/adium/ ) was in 2016. I build a MacOSX app bundle for the original Pidgin long time ago ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin-macosx/ ). At that point in time, this was not so trivial, as the GTK support for native MacOSX was…

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