Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

pidgin.im

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 181 posts

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#121

Post by s0rce »

valbaca wrote: post #2

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 mes…

I did ICQ (some IRC), then ICQ via Trillian, MSN Messenger, GChat, Imessage/Facebook/Instagram (sigh).

For work it was Slack and then MS Teams (again sigh).

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#122

Post by Gigachad »

kuschku wrote: post #116
Gigachad wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats probably more to do with your perspective rather than anything to do with the clients. I find discord to be very exciting and it’s always a joy to use. The idea of persistent voice channels might not have been invented by discord but it’s where the average person really first discovered them. Getting home and seeing a few friends on discord and joining in has always been a magic experience for me.

Are you saying average PC users never used TeamSpeak?

Power user gamers did. But the average person did not. The Discord user base is vastly bigger than teamspeaks ever was. Way more people have been introduced to the concept now and it’s spread way beyond gaming and PC power users.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#123

Post by scarby2 »

lopis wrote: post #75
eddieroger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It was 3G networks that enabled video calls from non smart phones back in 2005. The internet video chat didn't appear until later when HSDPA became a think

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#124

Post by Wowfunhappy »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #14
mdasen wrote: post #7

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.adiumxtras.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 di…

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 als…

What iChat plugins were there? I found this[1] for IRC but that's it (and I couldn't make it work despite being on an OS from the era).

It looks like MSN Messenger didn't require a plugin, it worked because it was XMPP which iChat/Messages supported out of the box, up until High Sierra I think.

1: https://www.cocobit.software/support/

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#125

Post by pabs3 »

sequoia wrote: post #93

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 d…

Pidgin has plugins for Google and Facebook now.

https://pidgin.im/plugins/

BTW, OTRv3 has pretty poor security these days, there is OTRv4 but it isn't ready for users yet.

https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#127

Post by pabs3 »

dijit wrote: post #12
valbaca wrote: post #2

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 mes…

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.

> Yeah, I think we need a new libpurple.

libpurple still exists and even has plugins for a lot of the protocols you mention, so no need to move away from it.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#130

Post by pabs3 »

pie_flavor wrote: post #42

Is pidgin's Discord experience anything to write home about?

There is a plugin for it:

https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord

Its about the same as any other Pidgin protocol (no audio AFAICT), with some support for some of the features of Discord like reactions. It gets updates for new features sometimes. The author has written a lot of different libpurple plugins and is quite busy though.

Note I've heard you can get banned from Discord for not using the official client.

Post reply on HN