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Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

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Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#391

Post by Wowfunhappy »

pmlnr wrote: post #158
albertzeyer wrote: post #11

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…

Adium is a frontend on libpurple. The frontend can be sort of happily dead if the backend - and it's plugins - are updated.

But as I understand it, Adium can't just use the same plugins as Pidgin, they're very similar but need to be modified a bit.

I ran into this ~ 6 months ago when I was trying to make Slack work in Adium. The plugin for Slack was outdated. There was a newer libpurple Slack plugin, but it wasn't compiled for Adium. I attempted to recompile it, but I couldn't seem to manage it, all of the tutorials on how to do it were super confusing...

(If anyone knows how to make Slack work in Adium in 2021, please let me know!)

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#392

Post by pabs3 »

exikyut wrote: post #382
chipx86 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, aside from Jabber, IRC, and the AIM TOC protocol (which was the weaker version — we used OSCAR, which was not open), we had to reverse-engineer most of the protocols, and keep up-to-date with changes. Often these services actively tried to block us, and we would spend weeks or months working around their changes. Yahoo was notorious for this. It's not entirely different than the current situation, in that regard,…

Well, sadly there's the fact that Discord has finally pulled out the official laser beams for the alternative client scene, such that Cordless recently called it quits: https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless Ripcord ( https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ ) doesn't seem to be giving any indications that it no longer works, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and probably for fairly large values of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ too) My computer is generally only able…

purple-discord for Pidgin still works just fine, they didn't even need to do any commits recently.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#393

Post by pabs3 »

sli wrote: post #254
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP , Discord , Skype , and Matrix .

Using Pidgin for Discord is probably a bad idea unless the Pidgin plugin has Discord's blessing. They ban for using third-party clients.

Pidgin for Discord has been working for years now. It breaks occasionally, but is usually fixed pretty quickly.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#394

Post by FillardMillmore »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #335
thesuitonym wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but people who aren't mechanics, but drive, still know how to do things like turn the car on, and understand that if they turn the steering wheel right, the wheels point to the right. They understand that the car needs gas, even if they don't really know why it needs gas. People who don't know how to use computers treat them like a magic box that may or may not do what they want to, if they use the right magical…

I think you’d be surprised just how much new car owners/drivers do not know about how to work a car. The number of people I’ve seen confused by how to fill a gas tank — let alone what type of gas to use, is massive. And it’ll only get worse as we move to electric and self-driving cars. And then there is the stuff that is often different car to car, like where lights are, how to adjust certain settings. Want to pair t…

Perhaps tangential - but what Mercedes models are you referring to? I've driven multiple recent Mercedes, A220, C300, CLA250, and have never had a real problem connecting the bluetooth on my phone. I believe all of these models have had a spin-dial media interface though - I can't stand touchscreen interfaces in cars - totally unintuitive and inconvenient while you're driving.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#396

Post by sneak »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #179
sneak wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Homebrew because it embeds spyware. I think we should all probably stop recommending it as a result.

Are you talking about the analytics? Which most package managers have. You can easily disable it: https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics#opting-out

None of the most popular package managers, such as those included in Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS, include spyware by default. ("opt-out", aka "assume consent even if you don't have it".)

There are things like popcon that you can opt in to, but those are optional ("opt in"), and aren't on by default.

Even just on macOS, neither nixpkgs nor macports will transmit your activities to anyone.

I think your "most" claim is inaccurate.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#397

Post by skinnymuch »

divbzero wrote: post #349
jandrese wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month. I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through…

I was surprised to find many of the newer chat systems supported by Pidgin plugins: Discord, Facebook, LINE, Signal, Skype, Slack, Telegram, WeChat, WhatsApp.

There’s different limitations for some. Facebook Messenger is only one on one. I’m in as many group chats as one on one so it doesn’t help. I’ll have to check the WhatsApp one. If that works well, that would be pretty nice.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#398

Post by skinnymuch »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #280
rewtraw wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come to HN for the incredibly out-of-touch takes like this.

like which "take"? you could literally be critiquing any of 10 onion-layers of dialog allegedly about an extinct PM client, but it turned into a "no one uses computers anymore, just phones" tale. I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user

What? The OP said they’re surprised not everyone uses Pidgin. That’s incredibly out of touch. I would expect that to be a joke otherwise. It sounds too crazy to think that’s the case now or ever.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#399

Post by 3np »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #77
jdlyga wrote: 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

I used it a lot way back. No complaints back then. Came back 6-12 months ago and both the Skype and Signal bridges were somewhat functional but silently stopped being connected and receiving messages very often.

Obv these kinds of things with unsupported potentially hostile APIs put high requirements of diligent maintenance.

IRC kept dropping connection and requiring new nickserv sign-in.

I thought libpurple/pidgin were mostly abandoned and that this would not be likely to improve , but it’s great to see that there’s hope and I might have been dismissing it prematurely.

Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client

#400

Post by sneak »

wruza wrote: post #136
sneak wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t have to put an entire message text into APNS notification. Apple (and google GCM, and webpush) notifications only deliver a structured event to the application (which may or may not contain any text), and once the app is activated (if not yet), it has to connect to its own server to get a full representation of what was sent, update vv-status, etc. APNS/GCM are not instant messengers on their own, though ma…

Sure, but there still needs to be a server somewhere that has the app developer's client certificate, connected to Apple, that knows when you get a DM and can send that zero-content "wake up and check your DMs" packet to your phone via APNS, which means it needs (given current apps permissions models) access to your DMs without you.
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