[zetalyrae]

I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.

[gardnr]

There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.

Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.

https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

[zetalyrae]

I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.

[alex1138]

Yeah but Facebook's 6 digit pin that they FORCED everyone on and severely disrupted messages and message history is totally a better system

Zuck deserves to be in prison along with other black hat hackers, this is just one of so many other things he's guilty of

[Gualdrapo]

I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.

"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".

[luke5441]

Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.

Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.

[dawnerd]

Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.

[twolegs]

And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.

[MiddleEndian]

It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

[jpalepu]

Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.

[techpression]

Back when apps dared to have fun icons. I still smile when I open Cyberduck because of the hilarious icon (which is extremely well designed).

[anthk]

Same code in the background. Kopete for KDE could use Adium chat themes and emoticons.

[SoftTalker]

> you could keep your chat logs forever

Or delete them!

[footy]

I use Beeper now, but Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.

[shantara]

I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.

[someotherperson]

You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).

[0] https://www.beeper.com/

[varun_ch]

I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).

I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.

[rw_grim]

We never went anywhere and have support for modern protocols... See https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/news and https://pidgin.im/plugins/

[shimman]

Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.

[ale42]

Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.

[anthk]

From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.

You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.

[hacker_homie]

I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.

I miss it.

[RadiozRadioz]

It's still there! Gary and the team are hard at work on Pidgin 3

[montag]

Shout out to Digsby as well. Similar app from around the same time period.

[xnx]

It's a miracle that we still have universally compatible email.

[blell]

GTK+ is only a native GUI toolkit in GNOME.