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Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

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Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#151

Post by nix23 »

labster wrote: post #107
kitsunesoba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

2010 was a great time. Adium for universal chat and XMPP federated services. You could find almost every movie on Netflix still. You could tell the difference between buttons and labels in UIs, and few hamburger menus were to be found. You could still get AppleWorks. Firefox wasn’t trying to sell you stuff. Televisions didn’t come preloaded with spyware. Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk…

>Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today.

You know it was thinking about that the other day, and i came to the conclusion that we're back in 1970, our powerful computers are mostly used as Terminals aka Browser connected to powerful monolithic service providers aka Mainframe.

That means Ken Olsen was right and yes even Larry Ellison.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#152

Post by aquova »

tjader wrote: post #17
dijit wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.…

Which bridging software do you use for some of these? I looked into doing something similar, but all of the ones I saw (at least for Discord) require manually duplicating each Discord channel in Matrix, and it looked to be a bit of a hassle.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#153

Post by rincebrain »

Kye wrote: post #97
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name.

But naim was such a nice client before finch was really a thing.

(No, I never did anything more exciting than have private conversations with individuals that might provoke this, and it tended to happen to swathes of people using third-party clients at once.)

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#154

Post by tjader »

aquova wrote: post #152
tjader wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Which bridging software do you use for some of these? I looked into doing something similar, but all of the ones I saw (at least for Discord) require manually duplicating each Discord channel in Matrix, and it looked to be a bit of a hassle.

I use matrix-appservice-irc, mautrix-{googlechat,telegram,whatsapp} and mx-puppet-discord.

I don't use Discord all that much and I just bridge a few specific rooms I'm interested in, but I think you can bridge entire servers at once as well.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#155

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

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…

Adium :), that brings back long forgotten memories from ~2003, staying up late to chat with friends about conspiracy theories and other asinine things no doubt.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#156

Post by skinnymuch »

Apocryphon wrote: post #84
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's still third party clients. I use Ferdi, which is the open-source equivalent to Franz and Rambox.

That’s just opening tabs with each chat service. Not dissimilar to doing that yourself with browser tabs. Which is basically what the clients you mentioned do

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#157

Post by skinnymuch »

pjerem wrote: post #76
duskwuff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve been surprised recently by the availability of plugins for libpurple (the lib on which Adium is based) which supports Telegram, Signal, Facebook …

The FB One at least probably doesn’t include group chats.

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#158

Post by skinnymuch »

pabs3 wrote: post #125
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

FB one doesn’t provide group chats as far as I’m aware. Maybe not Google one either?

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#159

Post by Markoff »

meh, I'm surprised nobody mentioned imo.im which was the last universal messenger I used (well you could use Gtalk/Facebook within outlook.com chat panel, so I guess that would be very last) and which unlike Miranda, Trillian, QIP and likes (unpopular Pidgin mentioned here with very low user base on Windows) didn't require installation and worked in browser, so you could use it on work computer, which was major benefit

Re: Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

#160

Post by Markoff »

dybber wrote: post #37
xnx wrote: post #28

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.

Not necessary, new EU regulation forces them to make their messaging services interoperable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30798850

you mean providing archaic SMS feature nobody will use, but which will satisfy EU laws?
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