14 ms·

Does 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://

Does 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 ago
At a certain point some services didn't work anymore, or not fully feature full. So yeah, ditched it
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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.
      - coding123 6y ago
        For me it was IRC ICQ AIM Trillian Skype Slack (just co-workers) Discord (just co-workers that are friends now) Must be like over a 30 year period of time.
      - proverbialbunny 6y ago
        >Bloomberg Messenger (bank paid 2k per month for it!), Nice https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/24953235/nice.jpg https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/24953235/nice.jpg It's amazing how much spinning happens in current media. The only people in the world who truly know how much this is are those who get the headlines before the stories are written and talked about, like day traders, who get it for speed reasons. It's cool, but it sucks it costs so much to get an unfiltered news source.
lukeramsden 6y ago
> i do not know which is funnier, that sean actually submitted this bug, or that you all are so stereotypically gentoo users as to take it seriously. and then marked as duplicate. seems like a lot of arguing went on on this bug tracker, very amusing to read
JustSomeNobody 6y ago
I finally stopped using it when Google Chat[0] went away. [0] Not that Google Chat, the other one.
- smt88 6y ago
  Google Talk* There was no product named Google Chat until recently.
  - JustSomeNobody 6y ago
    Ugh, you're right. I failed. I was used to using the slang "GChat" back in the day.
  - uluyol 6y ago
    What about the precursor to Google talk? You know, chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk. I thought it was Google Chat.
    - Macha 6y ago
      It was released as a standalone app in 2006 (after having a labs beta period prior) as Google Talk, and integrated into Gmail in 2007. While the widget in Gmail (which was only removed very recently to replace it with a Meet widget!) was labelled Chats, the service itself never was.
      - squeaky-clean 6y ago
        I think they're actually referring to Google Hangouts Chat
        Macha 6y ago
        > chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk. Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)
finiteseries 6y ago
Mate, the general population increasingly don’t even use desktops or laptops for personal usage anymore let alone a desktop OS specific IM client from the early 2000s.
- raarts 6y ago
  My daughter (who teaches math at HS) asked me to create educational videos for her kids who don't know how to work a computer. They only know phones.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    Kids can't use computers. http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
    - teawrecks 6y ago
      "She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB she'll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with." God this is some top tier incel shit.
      - Frost1x 6y ago
        Probably, but I'd say it's not far off from reality for many behavior and perspective wise. I think it unnecessarily transfers the behavior to misogyny (could easily be anyone/any sex), but that's the perspective many hold for those in tech: a means to an end. The addition of sex in the description definitely wasn't needed.
      - ricohboy 6y ago
aidenn0 6y ago
What chat protocol do you use it with?
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  XMPP, Discord, Skype, and Matrix.
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    Is there E2EE support for Matrix? Edit: Nope. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/18 https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/18
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      Nigh all of the protocols have incomplete support. I purely use it as a chat client and avoid most of the more complicated features, since I don't use them.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        Yeah, that's why I asked, because if you use only 1 chat protocol, a dedicated client is almost always better (now that ICQ and AIM are dead). Pidgin really shines if you need to aggregate multiple protocols in a single client.
        Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        Indeed, and that is why I use it. I certainly have no wish to have five different clients open, many of which not even scriptable when I can have all my contacts in one list.
        lproven 6y ago
        > now that ICQ and AIM are dead ICQ is alive and well, and has native clients for most modern OSes. https://icq.com/ https://icq.com/ It got bought out and spun off when AOL were shutting down.
m-p-3 6y ago
I would if there was a mobile app.
Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
This line cracked me up - Not sure I expect much more out of somebody that codes for AOL software.
clint 6y ago
Everyone I know stopped using AIM over a decade ago and by even 5 years ago Google Chat and everything else emptied out in favor of iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal etc...
- astura 6y ago
  AIM shut down more than three years ago.
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    Google made it pretty easy to migrate to chat/hangouts, too, by adding AIM integration.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
I stopped using it once ICQ stopped working with it. By that time, I only had 1 friend that was still using it, and we just switched to Discord anyways.
igetspam 6y ago
That was great. Thanks for sharing. The submitted patch and the linked dupe are pretty great too.
rewtraw 6y ago
I come to HN for the incredibly out-of-touch takes like this.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  like which "take"? you could literally be critiquing any of 10 onion-layers of dialog allegedly about an extinct PM client, but it turned into a "no one uses computers anymore, just phones" tale. I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user
  - wy35 6y ago
    > I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user It's not that deep. Someone unironically saying "Does not everyone still use [Pidgin]" is legitimately out of touch with consumers today.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    What? The OP said they’re surprised not everyone uses Pidgin. That’s incredibly out of touch. I would expect that to be a joke otherwise. It sounds too crazy to think that’s the case now or ever.
dheera 6y ago
Oh 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.
- ayewo 6y ago
  Pidgin was an excellent IM tool particularly on Linux desktops, but there were numerous times when I'm at someone else's computer and a web-based IM client like Meebo came in handy. http://meebo.com/ http://meebo.com/
  - onedr0p 6y ago
    Of course Google killed it, meebo was great and way ahead of it's time back then.
  - 6y ago
jandrese 6y ago
Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month. I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs They never provided third party APIs. The work of developing a unified messaging client was in getting around the ways in which they tried to stop you from interfacing with their system, and responding quickly when their countermeasures updated. We haven't seen a change in the behavior of chat providers; we've seen developers give up on trying.
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    Not true. Many protocols were open (even one of the AOL protocols), and also security basically didn't exist back then, almost everything was based on trust and obscurity.
- grep_name 6y ago
  Can this still be sorta-accomplished with ZNC and things like bitlbee, at least for the less privacy-focused services?
- divbzero 6y ago
  I was surprised to find many of the newer chat systems supported by Pidgin plugins: Discord, Facebook, LINE, Signal, Skype, Slack, Telegram, WeChat, WhatsApp.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    There’s different limitations for some. Facebook Messenger is only one on one. I’m in as many group chats as one on one so it doesn’t help. I’ll have to check the WhatsApp one. If that works well, that would be pretty nice.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> I hope to see this bug make the GWN for an example of what an INVALID bug looks like
tomjen3 6y ago
I would use it if it supported Facebook and whatsapp, because those are the services that my contacts are on.
isaac21259 6y ago
Speaking of great bug reports here's my favourite: Cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112
tj0 6y ago
My teenage/early 20s self is triggered by this bug report. Luckily I evolved and switched to Debian haha
natas 6y ago
gold
jl6 6y ago
Oh man, funroll-loops is down :(
filmgirlcw 6y ago
I literally haven’t used Adium in five years. Whenever Google deprecated XMPP from gchat and Apple killed iChat, there went my decade plus of daily Adium usage (and Gaim before that).
3np 6y ago
I used it a lot way back. No complaints back then. Came back 6-12 months ago and both the Skype and Signal bridges were somewhat functional but silently stopped being connected and receiving messages very often. Obv these kinds of things with unsupported potentially hostile APIs put high requirements of diligent maintenance. IRC kept dropping connection and requiring new nickserv sign-in. I thought libpurple/pidgin were mostly abandoned and that this would not be likely to improve , but it’s great to see that there’s hope and I might have been dismissing it prematurely.

Does 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 ago

At a certain point some services didn't work anymore, or not fully feature full. So yeah, ditched it

proverbialbunny 6y ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
    - coding123 6y ago
      For me it was IRC ICQ AIM Trillian Skype Slack (just co-workers) Discord (just co-workers that are friends now) Must be like over a 30 year period of time.
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      >Bloomberg Messenger (bank paid 2k per month for it!), Nice https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/24953235/nice.jpg https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/24953235/nice.jpg It's amazing how much spinning happens in current media. The only people in the world who truly know how much this is are those who get the headlines before the stories are written and talked about, like day traders, who get it for speed reasons. It's cool, but it sucks it costs so much to get an unfiltered news source.

lukeramsden 6y ago

> i do not know which is funnier, that sean actually submitted this bug, or that you all are so stereotypically gentoo users as to take it seriously. and then marked as duplicate. seems like a lot of arguing went on on this bug tracker, very amusing to read

JustSomeNobody 6y ago

I finally stopped using it when Google Chat[0] went away. [0] Not that Google Chat, the other one.

smt88 6y ago
Google Talk* There was no product named Google Chat until recently.
- JustSomeNobody 6y ago
  Ugh, you're right. I failed. I was used to using the slang "GChat" back in the day.
- uluyol 6y ago
  What about the precursor to Google talk? You know, chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk. I thought it was Google Chat.
  - Macha 6y ago
    It was released as a standalone app in 2006 (after having a labs beta period prior) as Google Talk, and integrated into Gmail in 2007. While the widget in Gmail (which was only removed very recently to replace it with a Meet widget!) was labelled Chats, the service itself never was.
    - squeaky-clean 6y ago
      I think they're actually referring to Google Hangouts Chat
      - Macha 6y ago
        > chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk. Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)

finiteseries 6y ago

Mate, the general population increasingly don’t even use desktops or laptops for personal usage anymore let alone a desktop OS specific IM client from the early 2000s.

raarts 6y ago
My daughter (who teaches math at HS) asked me to create educational videos for her kids who don't know how to work a computer. They only know phones.
- superkuh 6y ago
  Kids can't use computers. http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
  - teawrecks 6y ago
    "She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB she'll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with." God this is some top tier incel shit.
    - Frost1x 6y ago
      Probably, but I'd say it's not far off from reality for many behavior and perspective wise. I think it unnecessarily transfers the behavior to misogyny (could easily be anyone/any sex), but that's the perspective many hold for those in tech: a means to an end. The addition of sex in the description definitely wasn't needed.
    - ricohboy 6y ago

aidenn0 6y ago

What chat protocol do you use it with?

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
XMPP, Discord, Skype, and Matrix.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Is there E2EE support for Matrix? Edit: Nope. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/18 https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/18
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    Nigh all of the protocols have incomplete support. I purely use it as a chat client and avoid most of the more complicated features, since I don't use them.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Yeah, that's why I asked, because if you use only 1 chat protocol, a dedicated client is almost always better (now that ICQ and AIM are dead). Pidgin really shines if you need to aggregate multiple protocols in a single client.
      - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        Indeed, and that is why I use it. I certainly have no wish to have five different clients open, many of which not even scriptable when I can have all my contacts in one list.
      - lproven 6y ago
        > now that ICQ and AIM are dead ICQ is alive and well, and has native clients for most modern OSes. https://icq.com/ https://icq.com/ It got bought out and spun off when AOL were shutting down.

m-p-3 6y ago

I would if there was a mobile app.

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago

This line cracked me up - Not sure I expect much more out of somebody that codes for AOL software.

clint 6y ago

Everyone I know stopped using AIM over a decade ago and by even 5 years ago Google Chat and everything else emptied out in favor of iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal etc...

astura 6y ago
AIM shut down more than three years ago.
- RankingMember 6y ago
  Google made it pretty easy to migrate to chat/hangouts, too, by adding AIM integration.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

I stopped using it once ICQ stopped working with it. By that time, I only had 1 friend that was still using it, and we just switched to Discord anyways.

igetspam 6y ago

That was great. Thanks for sharing. The submitted patch and the linked dupe are pretty great too.

rewtraw 6y ago

I come to HN for the incredibly out-of-touch takes like this.

hootbootscoot 6y ago
like which "take"? you could literally be critiquing any of 10 onion-layers of dialog allegedly about an extinct PM client, but it turned into a "no one uses computers anymore, just phones" tale. I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user
- wy35 6y ago
  > I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user It's not that deep. Someone unironically saying "Does not everyone still use [Pidgin]" is legitimately out of touch with consumers today.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  What? The OP said they’re surprised not everyone uses Pidgin. That’s incredibly out of touch. I would expect that to be a joke otherwise. It sounds too crazy to think that’s the case now or ever.

dheera 6y ago

Oh 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.

ayewo 6y ago
Pidgin was an excellent IM tool particularly on Linux desktops, but there were numerous times when I'm at someone else's computer and a web-based IM client like Meebo came in handy. http://meebo.com/ http://meebo.com/
- onedr0p 6y ago
  Of course Google killed it, meebo was great and way ahead of it's time back then.
- 6y ago

jandrese 6y ago

Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month. I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs They never provided third party APIs. The work of developing a unified messaging client was in getting around the ways in which they tried to stop you from interfacing with their system, and responding quickly when their countermeasures updated. We haven't seen a change in the behavior of chat providers; we've seen developers give up on trying.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Not true. Many protocols were open (even one of the AOL protocols), and also security basically didn't exist back then, almost everything was based on trust and obscurity.
grep_name 6y ago
Can this still be sorta-accomplished with ZNC and things like bitlbee, at least for the less privacy-focused services?
divbzero 6y ago
I was surprised to find many of the newer chat systems supported by Pidgin plugins: Discord, Facebook, LINE, Signal, Skype, Slack, Telegram, WeChat, WhatsApp.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  There’s different limitations for some. Facebook Messenger is only one on one. I’m in as many group chats as one on one so it doesn’t help. I’ll have to check the WhatsApp one. If that works well, that would be pretty nice.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> I hope to see this bug make the GWN for an example of what an INVALID bug looks like

tomjen3 6y ago

I would use it if it supported Facebook and whatsapp, because those are the services that my contacts are on.

isaac21259 6y ago

Speaking of great bug reports here's my favourite: Cat sitting on keyboard crashes lightdm https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1463112

tj0 6y ago

My teenage/early 20s self is triggered by this bug report. Luckily I evolved and switched to Debian haha

natas 6y ago

gold

jl6 6y ago

Oh man, funroll-loops is down :(

filmgirlcw 6y ago

I literally haven’t used Adium in five years. Whenever Google deprecated XMPP from gchat and Apple killed iChat, there went my decade plus of daily Adium usage (and Gaim before that).

3np 6y ago

I used it a lot way back. No complaints back then. Came back 6-12 months ago and both the Skype and Signal bridges were somewhat functional but silently stopped being connected and receiving messages very often. Obv these kinds of things with unsupported potentially hostile APIs put high requirements of diligent maintenance. IRC kept dropping connection and requiring new nickserv sign-in. I thought libpurple/pidgin were mostly abandoned and that this would not be likely to improve , but it’s great to see that there’s hope and I might have been dismissing it prematurely.