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Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alte
by jdlyga 6y ago
Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.
- vehemenz 6y agoYes. It was the de facto AIM client for many years.
- zshift 6y agoI had a real Obi Wan Kenobi moment when I saw this at the top of hackernews.
- valarauko 6y agoI wonder if he means old Ben Kenobi
- dewarrn1 6y agoThese are not the IM protocols you seek. On-topic, Pidgin remains great, I still install it on every new desktop, but I haven't fired it up in years. I suppose it's been displaced by Slack, more's the pity.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoNah, these are elegant weapons from a more civilized age. When developers talked about protocols rather than products.
- ehsankia 6y agoI still have my .purple backup. It even had a Steam plugin I recall which was great since Steam itself didn't have chat logs.
- wruza 6y agoIf anyone is curious why it is called .purple, here you go: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple
- thesuitonym 6y agoThat doesn't really answer why it's called purple. As I recall, there used to be something about it being named for the PRogram PLugins (prpl) that (then) Gaim used.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoI didn't get that info from there
- meow112012 6y agoWhen they renamed the app, I pruned my chat logs by some mistake renaming the logging folders. I lost my most important logs then :(
- reddotX 6y agopidgin + ubuntu. i remember
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoDoes not everyone still use it? I and most of my friends do. They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890 https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890
- jbverschoor 6y agoAt a certain point some services didn't work anymore, or not fully feature full. So yeah, ditched it
- proverbialbunny 6y agoI wouldn't be surprised that is how they lost the majority of their user base. Everyone I know was on it, myself included, but once support was hampered around the time the AIM protocol died, most people around me left for Telegram and Signal.
- jbverschoor 6y agoI dunno.. I guess I just follow what people use... IRC ICQ MSN Yahoo messenger for some people in japan Whatsapp, but noboday was there haha Whastapp, some people there FB Messenger iMessage, but bugs with normals SMS, so disabled it Google talk.. used by some, but I like to de-google a bit. Back to whatsapp kakaotalk, line, and wechat for research / gaming Telegram. don't like it at all Signal. kind of buggy So in the end, I'm using whatsapp ads it's still ubiquitous here, and it's one of the most secure platforms.
- anthony_barker 6y agoI followed the same path. Also used Jabber a bit, AOL Messenger, Blackberry messenger, Bloomberg Messenger (bank paid 2k per month for it!), Skype for messaging, Keybase (kind of cool but too heavy), Slack, and now Element Matrix. Its one place sometimes I think regulation might be good to force standardization (like electricity or phone standards). Oh and when I go to asia I use the ones there - viber, line, wechat etc.
- cpach 6y agoI sure do! I used Jabber a lot back in the day.
- Macha 6y agoI miss those days. The issues with a modern client for something like this is that companies are much more hostile to being cut out of the user experience these days. No more is it just passive aggressive protocol changes to break third party clients, they're more happy to ban end users for using unofficial clients (e.g. discord, whatsapp) or require secrets/tokens they can go after third party apps for including.
- mindcrime 6y agoRemember it? I use it every day. I assumed pretty much everybody else does too. shrug That said, it is annoying how so many chat services have gone out of their way to break the ability of 3rd party clients like Pidgin to work. :-(
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoYou assumed pretty much everyone used a desktop specific chat app that is 20 years old?
- Gualdrapo 6y agoAnd you assumed everyone who wanted a desktop chat app used pidgin and nothing else? Because there were plenty of "multi-service" apps. It's just that Pidgin was the more popular among Linux users.
- astura 6y agoYeah, Trillian was, by far, most common among the general public (the non-programming, non-techy types). Honestly, Pidgin was pretty niche, I don't know of any non-techies that used it.
- sli 6y agoMulti-chat clients had limited appeal by design because non-techies were more likely to just pick whatever service was the most convenient to them. Seems expected that it would be the techie folks consolidating all their friends because they were more willing to use multiple services than the average non-tech user. Even Trillian was fairly niche by comparison, just far less so than Pidgin. Pidgin's psychic mode plugin was great fun, though.
- jcelerier 6y agoi mean, I'm typing this message from Firefox which has pretty much a direct lineage to Netscape (1994), on an OS from 1991, using an instruction set which mostly comes from the 1970s
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoDon't forget the numerous add-ons, skins if I remember correctly end-to-end encryption was just a PGP add-on away and you're right pidgin was one of the first things I installed on Linux machines and it's clone Adium for Mac OSX[1]. Sadly I don't do real-time communication anymore and even if I do I don't think any of my pidgin/adium (XMPP) contacts still use them. [1] https://adium.im/ https://adium.im/
- thesuitonym 6y agoI didn't even know Pidgin had skins. The big attraction for me was that I didn't have to pick an obnoxious skin like Trillian. It just used whatever your system theme was, and the default GTK skin looked like it belonged in Windows XP.
- tmpxgdqrcKFuG 6y agoI miss Adium Trillian used to be like Pidgin and Adium on Windows but then they went and made its own IM service.
- saas_sam 6y agoI haven't used Adium in like 15 years but that honking noise will be with me for eternity.
- grishka 6y agoAdium still works on modern macOS, in fact, I'm running it right now for IRC. And there's already an issue on github asking about M1 support :)
- freeAgent 6y agoI believe Trillian still continued to support other networks (as long as they could) after introducing "Astra" or whatever they called their own chat network. Most of them have died off over time or locked out 3rd party clients (AIM, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
- Svperstar 6y agoYears ago I setup a doctors office to use Pidgin with the Bonjour protocol for local IMs that wouldn't go over the internet. Worked well. Free too.
- nebolo 6y agoI used Miranda - seems likes its getting developed
- leahey 6y agoAnd GAIM was based on Gamera, the official AOL Linux client.
- morelisp 6y agoI don't think so - I believe the original GAIM client used the open TOC protocol, e.g. from TiK which was the official Tk-based AIM client, some years before Gamera.
- flatiron 6y agoI remember when they shut down TOC. I think that was close to the time it was renamed gaim to pidgin. My whole college career surrounded aol away messages. One time I put an away message of “Dave Matthew’s coming to play at our school. Click here for tickets” and directed them to goatse. Yeah I was super cool.
- jeramey 6y agoYou are correct. At the time, AOL had released TiK and documented the TOC protocol but TiK was a bit slow and clunky, so Mark Spencer, the original author of GAIM, implemented faster client in C using GTK for the UI. OSCAR support came later because OSCAR supported some additional presence features (I think?? It's been a while...) and because ICQ also used OSCAR. Pidgin and libpurple also have roots in another project called Everybuddy which was one of the first multi-protocol integrated free software chat clients. As I recall, Torrey Searle started Everybuddy because he was having a hard time getting traction on adding multiple protocols to GAIM at the time for a variety of reasons my hazy memory doesn't really remember. For a couple of years after GAIM started to get plugin and multiple protocol support, much code was shared between GAIM and Everybuddy, and then eventually effort centered around just one of the code bases which eventually became Pidgin and libpurple. Source: I was involved in GAIM early on and Torrey is a friend from those days.
- nikolay 6y agoI've used on Windows and it was quite buggy and crashy at the time... over a decade ago.
- sv0 6y agoI used it as ICQ client back in 2000's. And I use Pidgin as a Jabber messenger with self hosted XMPP server.
- mlaretallack 6y agoyep. I used it when I had to talk to all my friends on msn messanger etc.. one app to talk to everyone no matter what they where using. Now I have to have 10 different apps to talk to just 10 friends.
- kilroy123 6y agoOh yes. Good times. That's when I still occasionally used AIM.
- severino 6y agoYes, unless you used KDE, in which case you installed Kopete.
- mseidl 6y agoI used pidgin along time ago when I was using aim/msn/yahoo. It's been a REALLY long time.
- canistr 6y agoUsing Pidgin with OTR was the way to go for private chats. shrug
- dheera 6y agoOh damn, Pidgin. I LOVED that app. 15 years ago I had ONE messaging app that logged me into MSN, ICQ, QQ, Zephyr, Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, and Renren. On that one messaging app I had either written or downloaded plugins for: * End-to-end encryption (receiver needed the plugin as well) * Automatic two-way human language translation via online translation APIs so I could have a conversation with someone who didn't share a common language with me * Automatic two-way conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese. (I can read both, but traditional is faster for me, so I had it auto-translate all simplified to traditional for me, as well as auto-translate all of my outgoing traditional to simplified on a per-user basis for the receiver's convenience.) * Ability to create conversation groups across networks, with my account serving as a gateway. * Automatic rendering of in-line LaTeX math equations. * Controlling of IOT devices, and allowing access to my dorm room for guests by having them send me an instant message with a certain secret word. * Cloud-based logs of all of my messages. * Online gateway that allowed me to access all my message logs from anywhere on any device and any OS with a web browser. I feel like we've gone backwards. I now have a dozen different closed-protocol, walled-garden messaging apps, some of them even actively try to PUNISH you for trying to decompile and edit them, translation is not automatic, cloud logs only exist on Facebook messenger, E2E encryption is skeptically touted and paraded as some new thing even though I personally had real open-source E2E encryption 15 years ago on ALL my messengers, and everyone is siloed into their own apps and there is no way to send messages across networks. Sigh. Tech in 2021 sucks. I honestly felt my messaging was way more advanced 15 years ago.
- meow112012 6y agoyes I do, a lot. Pidgin is awesome. I used it with Yahoo, irc chat. Unfortunately my life is all about slack and telegram today :(
- jannes 6y agoThere were also Miranda [0] and Trillian back in the day. Trillian is still around but it has changed a lot. [0]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/miranda/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/miranda/
- trts 6y agoMiranda was (is) awesome, I love that it is styled after the original ICQ client. It still worked with Google Chat and FB Messenger the last time I tried it (<2 years), but the list of people I know who actively use gchat has declined from dozens to 5 or fewer.
- magicalhippo 6y agoI recall it well. Was never quite as stable as the native clients, so I just used those. And then Steam came along with chat and that was that.
- emilsedgh 6y agoGaim was one of the best apps out there. I'd absolutely love to use it. But what do I use it for? Nowadays I talk to people on Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack and Telegram and none of them can be used on Pidgin. Not Pidgin's fault I know. Just companies trying to lock people in.
- spijdar 6y agoJust a heads up, at least several of those are supported to varying degrees. Looks like WhatsApp is supported through its web API, and slack and telegram's protocols are supported. Facebook messenger is no go, though.
- mqus 6y agoBut facebook messenger at least used to work, I know I used it with pidgin before
- paulryanrogers 6y agoFacebook used to support XMPP. Which predates their separate Messanger app.
- rw_grim 6y agoThere's modern facebook support with https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/ https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/
- im_the_internet 6y agoI'm currently using Pidgin for Facebook Messenger with https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/ https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/
- outworlder 6y agoThere's a Slack plugin for Pidgin!?! I need to try this immediately.
- asveikau 6y agoAs gaim it was indepensible to someone like me at the time, a late 90s american teenager exploring Linux. But new, younger people are coming up every day and not all of them are up on the old hits. AIM is totally dead, and even some of the other protocols you might use pidgin for, like standard xmpp, as I used to do with pidgin and gtalk, are not as relevant as they were before.
- mpd 6y agoI feel so old seeing this. I was using GAIM very shortly after it was publicly released, and basically continued with Pidgin up until AIM died a few years back. I don't use any equivalent nowadays.
- boboche 6y agoback in the ICQ days..omg,
- paulwilson05 6y agoI remember this Pidgin! It was one of the first applications I remember using in Ubuntu 15ish years ago.
- midasuni 6y agoI haven’t used it since yesterday. We still have lync/Skype for business at work and it plugs into that. Audio never seems to work, fortunatly in the rare occasion someone calls it also rings my phone. Most of my chat for work is on slack or WhatsApp, just some real old school people that use the Skype protocol.
- anta40 6y agoI still remember Pidgin very well. Back in 2006 (or 2007?), most of my campus friends used YM on Meebo. I used Pidgin until 2011, I guess. There was Pidgin portable, which was very easy to use on computer labs where you don't have install acess. Then most people switched to BBM. I worked as a BlackBerry dev at that time, so I followed that path.