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.
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.
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.
Mark Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters (a Harvard newspaper) who were investigating him for Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg's company took people's API-facing emails that were in their profiles and replaced them with a facebook.com address. Mark Zuckerberg's company deleted years of his own correspondence. This in addition to things like Onavo
Yeah, I'm suggesting he go to prison for "doing whatever he wants"
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".
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).
I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
And bear in mind KDE3 was considered the bloated DE, as XFCE (even the GTK2 build) could snappily run with 64 MB of RAM and maybe less with a light GTK engine (yes, choosing the GTK2 engine mattered a lot back in the day).
And, yes, choosing Pidgin and a light window manager such as Fluxbox/Openbox could make run machine run well with 64MB at really fast speeds.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Interesting, there are apparently working plugins for both Signal and Whatsapp! Both appear to work as secondary devices. What would really be great is to have the possibility of using Pidgin as primary device...
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.
