Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#61

Post by pabs3 » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

Pidgin still has a ton of modern messaging platform plugins:

https://pidgin.im/plugins/

OTR is sadly fairly dead; broken encryption, OTRv4 isn't out of beta yet.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#62

Post by toastal » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:31 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #61

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

Pidgin still has a ton of modern messaging platform plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ OTR is sadly fairly dead; broken encryption, OTRv4 isn't out of beta yet.

Looks like OMEMO support hasn't landed either https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 The Pidgin/libpurple team has a lot to handle as all of these proprietary chat options are constantly moving targets and trying to maintain feature parity on all of them. At least the FOSS options have publicly-documented specs and aren't actively hostile towards reverse engineering.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#63

Post by pabs3 » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:48 AM UTC

toastal wrote: post #62

pabs3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pidgin still has a ton of modern messaging platform plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ OTR is sadly fairly dead; broken encryption, OTRv4 isn't out of beta yet.

Looks like OMEMO support hasn't landed either https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 The Pidgin/libpurple team has a lot to handle as all of these proprietary chat options are constantly moving targets and trying to maintain feature parity on all of them. At least the FOSS options have publicly-documented specs and aren't actively hostile towards reverse engineering.

OMEMO is for XMPP only so not as useful as OTR, but there is already a plugin for it:

https://github.com/gkdr/lurch

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#64

Post by indiafoodie » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:53 AM UTC

Thanks. What protocol spec did you implement? Is it documented or reverse engineered? I ask only so we can watch for which ones Microsoft is most likely to iterate and change.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#65

Post by toastal » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:59 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #63

toastal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like OMEMO support hasn't landed either https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 The Pidgin/libpurple team has a lot to handle as all of these proprietary chat options are constantly moving targets and trying to maintain feature parity on all of them. At least the FOSS options have publicly-documented specs and aren't actively hostile towards reverse engineering.

OMEMO is for XMPP only so not as useful as OTR, but there is already a plugin for it: https://github.com/gkdr/lurch

Awesome. I hadn't seen that. I remember using OTR in the past and switching from machines didn't really work, but the multi-client support that OMEMO brings though is pretty critical in a time where a most have multiple devices. Is this something v4 brings?

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#66

Post by ptman » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:11 AM UTC

grishka wrote: post #46

corndoge wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.

And there's still not a single decent Matrix client for macOS. Best case you get some ugly-ass QT thing that doesn't work anything like a macOS app would. The official and most featureful Matrix client is even worse than that, it's an electron app, ugh. The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text…

There is a spec change proposal for fixing this: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/253...

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#67

Post by severino » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:15 AM UTC

hestefisk wrote: post #22

Imagine a chat application with Teams that is actually /usable/. I really miss the days of Pidgin. Fun fact: the KDE / Linux client for MSN had a feature whereby it would notify me (by opening a window) if someone had clicked on my profile in MSN Messenger and started typing a message, but not yet sent it. It was a really nice way of freaking regular MSN Messenger users out. I cannot remember what the name of the app…

Kopete? I also remember some Linux MSN clients at the time actually told you when some contact closed the conversation window. That was really cool.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#68

Post by anthk » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

Libpurple + local IRC server = Bitlbee. It's still amazing to be able to chat with everyone from everywhere, even a potato from early 90's.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#69

Post by anthk » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:23 AM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #5

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

With TTS and STT it felt like a super power

I remember a Pidgin plugin to translate the incoming messages inline. Also the same for the ones you sent.

Re: Purple-Teams: MS Teams Plugin for Pidgin (2022)

#70

Post by captainmuon » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 9:04 AM UTC

ecliptik wrote: post #3

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

Back in the day I also used Miranda, a lightweight multiplatform messenger for Windows which I liked a lot. And later, Pidgin on Linux.

The status messages on ICQ and MSN were neat and anticipated Twitter for me.

What made it difficult for me was the added features of certain platforms. ICQ had little games and fancy emojis, and if somebody sent them to you you would miss it. I was really afraid to miss important social interactions :-). Also these apps didn't make the move to mobile, unfortunately.