11 ms·

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was ca

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/ https://www.pidgin.im/

Gigachad 5y ago
Agreed, not sure what the use case is. It’s super trivial to switch between messaging apps and it’s not often that you are having a conversation with multiple people over multiple apps at once and even then it’s still manageable. The only thing I can think of is people who do not wish to have the app installed for privacy / open source reasons.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Think of people who are: - Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around. - People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden. - Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices. - People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all those clients together and each individually, and who'd prefer a single, consistent, ergonomic and powerful UI to manage the torrent of messages they receive.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    The first two are not well solved by Matrix as the default client is far less user friendly than the proprietary alternatives. Storage space might be an issue on very low end phones but these days phones are starting with 128gb of storage which no IM app is close to filling. Mobile OSs are extremely good at sleeping apps and can receive messages while the app is not running at all using notification services. I would say that resource bloat is actually much more of an issue on desktop where you have 10 instances of chrome running and none can be closed while still receiving notifications.
dTal 5y ago
No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.
- dtonon 5y ago
  It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).
  - saurik 5y ago
    Pidgin doesn't use a "bridge"... it is just a generic local client that supports plugins for various protocols that are implemented via adversarial interoperability.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      And because of that Pidgin is horribly unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, I used it for years, but over time all the plug-ins broke for one reason or another.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        Law makers are required here to solve the situation, as platforms themselves refuse to work with each other. If Facebook and Google had to operate a common protocol (just like IMAP), Pidgin would work much better or wouldn't even be needed. But no, they want to prevent people from talking with each other via other platforms because "we're best" or whatever.
        hellojesus 5y ago
        It's probably because they don't want to lose users. If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile? The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.
enlyth 5y ago
Anyone remember Trillian? I used to use it to combine Facebook Messenger, ICQ, and some other stuff. All my friends have since moved to Discord now which is way nicer than any other user experience.
- adamw2k 5y ago
  Yep, brings be back... + AIM, MSN, they even had a primitive IRC connection if memory serves me right.
jakecopp 5y ago
> While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. I'm unclear if it supports relay mode, but if so, you can invite Matrix, Signal, and WhatsApp users into the same group chat! [1] Edit: Relay mode is not currently supported in Element One, I tried it out. I contacted support and they said "we will discuss this internally and possibly enabled it later" I've been using this on my self-hosted version of the bridge and it does wonders for those friends who are on Signal but don't want to try another app. Also, a lot of people just don't want to swap between apps for direct messaging people on different services. This means you can use any Matrix compatible app [2] to chat with anyone on Matrix/WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram. [1]: https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/python/signal/relay-mode.md https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/python/s... [2]: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/
josteink 5y ago
> Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols It was not a not a service which was always on and synced between units. It was a client you had to run on your machine and keep connected. And it obviously didn’t roam. Pretty much an apples to oranges comparison. Matrix and Element aims to bring all those things you mention to a single protocol, to which you can connect any client you like, on any device you like, and roam as you like with all your clients always in sync. It’s what Pidgin used to deliver, levelled up and connected to the “modern” (read: closed) IM-silos the majority of people are using. It’s definitely different and it’s definitely interesting.
upofadown 5y ago
I think this is more like XMPP transports in that is is centralized at the server. Such things tended to end up centralized as it is a lot of work to keep up with the efforts of the people running the services to remain incompatible with the bridges. These days few XMPP servers bother with transports to commercial IM services. I suspect the same thing will happen in the Matrix case.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Transports work against your platform. Running a WhatsApp transport, you enhance WhatsApp's network effect and dilute your own.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Transports work for you when you're an upstart, because it makes it less risky for users to adopt your platform. They work against you only once you get significant market share. See e.g. Slack, which propelled itself to success by offering an IRC transport, which prevented strong opposition for technically inclined people, and then promptly killing it when they became a major player in the office IM space.
cookiengineer 5y ago
I thought about all that libpurple did back then, including OTR encryption that worked perfectly fine with others. These days I think that most services try to make money with stuff that was built decades ago already, and they're just keeping the reinventing cycle spinning. Anyone remember the franz app [1] ...which finally led to the hardfork of ferdi? [2] I feel that element one is franz all over again. [1] https://meetfranz.com https://meetfranz.com [2] https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Franz was mainly just web views, no? Ferdi appears to be the same. This is different.
arp242 5y ago
> I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? I used Pidgin a lot. I always found it very convenient to have everything in one place and UI. Better one client than MSN + AOL + ICQ + IRC + Yahoo! + XMPP. In the last few years I haven't used it much, but that's because it just doesn't support the popular messaging apps of the day (or maybe it now does, I haven't checked in a while). Also, as others have pointed out, Pidgin is not and never has been a "service", it's just a library (libpurple) that implements various protocols, with Pidgin as the GUI (they also make Finch, a TUI).
- oblio 5y ago
  Pidgin was extremely convenient. But it was commoditizing messaging platforms so of course it had to be shot in the head by them.
  - pi7h3n 5y ago
    who's them?
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      > messaging platforms No need to pretend that what the previous comment was saying is some kind of conspiracy when it's obvious that business gonna business.
      - pi7h3n 5y ago
        oof
  - arp242 5y ago
    I don't think anything got "shot in the end"; the protocols of old were often just reverse-engineered too. Few bothered publishing anything about it, which is why Jabber/XMPP was created. Since then encryption made things a lot harder; specifically, E2E encryption. You can't "just" login to a server and send messages, you need to encrypt and decrypt things on the device with the right keys, and how do you handle things like message history WhatsApp and Signal solve this for the desktop/web versions by designating your phone as the only device that can connect to their service, and everything else communicates via that phone. Telegram solves it by having regular chats not be E2E encrypted, and having a special "secret chat" feature for it.
johnisgood 5y ago
Pidgin and Gajim.
h0nd 5y ago
Two decades ago I used trillian and mirianda for all the popular messaging protocols, https://trillian.im/ https://trillian.im/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/
luke2m 5y ago
Pidgin works with a surprising number of modern services [0]. I used it last year on my 32 bit computer that couldn’t run the official discord client.
mcjiggerlog 5y ago
There was a good recent episode of Late Night Linux Extra[0] where the maintainer talks about Pidgin and how it compares with Matrix. [0] https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32/ https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32...
fimdomeio 5y ago
Back in the day and for a little while platforms companies thought to at least have a common language (xmpp). Then they thought it would be a better idea if we all had 10 different apps on our phones for text messages. There's no reason for standardization and interoperability not to be forced on these companies. When you sent a physical letter you have to follow some standards on the envelope addresses, when you make a phone call to the other side of the world people can still hear your voice, same for sms, same for email, but apparently sending a string of text via internet in a standard protocol is an unsolvable problem.
- mehdix 5y ago
  Companies must be forced to implement a subset of their features as part of some interoperability standard. The rest they can keep for their competitive advantage. I can't recall any industry who ever volunteered for this. Car makers didn't, telecoms didn't, software makers won't. No one did and they all exploited their users/customers to the fullest until they were forced to do so.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  think about this: WA protocol was simply XMPP with shorter labels (one character when possible)
Ntrails 5y ago
I still use pidgin regularly for various chat rooms and ircs etc. It is a great piece of kit imo
k1rcher 5y ago
Ah, XMPP + OTR. Brings back fond memories.
pmlnr 5y ago
There, it's still good: https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins
- tetrisgm 5y ago
  I’d use the f out of this… if this was easy to setup. I’d like that but with one click and some settings things to sign.
briffle 5y ago
The Glory days, when both Google Talk and Facebook used XMPP, and you can run one client to chat with all of them. We ran Prosidy and Pidgin at my old job, and it worked great for our company chat server.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Facebook group chats were xmpp too? I thought they never were
ksec 5y ago
Everything old is new again.
klntsky 5y ago
I really love libpurple plugins for pidgin and how they can be combined. For example, I was able to communicate using OTR on vk.com (russian facebook clone). Probably other niche messaging plugins work with OTR too (it's just plaintext messages, after all).
ruffrey 5y ago
Fun fact, pidgin was developed by Mark Spencer, who also wrote Asterisk PBX and currently builds open source flight avionics.
estaseuropano 5y ago
I think Trillian was even older, and I think there were some KDE apps that did it even before that...
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  Kopete https://apps.kde.org/kopete/ https://apps.kde.org/kopete/
shmerl 5y ago
Pidgin is an IM client, not a service. A service would be something like XMPP servers (Google Talk used to be one and even federated until it went sideways).
gorgoiler 5y ago
Pidgin? Pffff! That’s some casual stuff right there. Real Scotsmen used bitlbee and irssi to enable their IRC addiction, long after everyone else had moved on to harder stuff. :)
niutech 5y ago
Now there is another open source alternative: Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge) connecting: Mattermost, IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Rocketchat, Twitch, SSH-chat, Zulip, WhatsApp, Keybase, Matrix, Microsoft Teams, NextCloud, Mumble, VK and more. The use case is simple: instead of using plethora of IM apps, have all your conversations in one place.
- knocte 5y ago
  Wow, this seems better than ElementOne?

Gigachad 5y ago

Agreed, not sure what the use case is. It’s super trivial to switch between messaging apps and it’s not often that you are having a conversation with multiple people over multiple apps at once and even then it’s still manageable. The only thing I can think of is people who do not wish to have the app installed for privacy / open source reasons.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Think of people who are: - Not tech-savvy and easily confused by keeping 6 different messengers around. - People for whom multiple clients becomes a cognitive burden. - Waste of storage space, memory and CPU power that those (hugely bloated, most of the time) clients incur, especially on mobile devices. - People like me, with diminished executive functioning capacity, who are fucking tired of bad ergonomics of all those clients together and each individually, and who'd prefer a single, consistent, ergonomic and powerful UI to manage the torrent of messages they receive.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  The first two are not well solved by Matrix as the default client is far less user friendly than the proprietary alternatives. Storage space might be an issue on very low end phones but these days phones are starting with 128gb of storage which no IM app is close to filling. Mobile OSs are extremely good at sleeping apps and can receive messages while the app is not running at all using notification services. I would say that resource bloat is actually much more of an issue on desktop where you have 10 instances of chrome running and none can be closed while still receiving notifications.

dTal 5y ago

No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

dtonon 5y ago
It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).
- saurik 5y ago
  Pidgin doesn't use a "bridge"... it is just a generic local client that supports plugins for various protocols that are implemented via adversarial interoperability.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    And because of that Pidgin is horribly unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, I used it for years, but over time all the plug-ins broke for one reason or another.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Law makers are required here to solve the situation, as platforms themselves refuse to work with each other. If Facebook and Google had to operate a common protocol (just like IMAP), Pidgin would work much better or wouldn't even be needed. But no, they want to prevent people from talking with each other via other platforms because "we're best" or whatever.
      - hellojesus 5y ago
        It's probably because they don't want to lose users. If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile? The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.

enlyth 5y ago

Anyone remember Trillian? I used to use it to combine Facebook Messenger, ICQ, and some other stuff. All my friends have since moved to Discord now which is way nicer than any other user experience.

adamw2k 5y ago
Yep, brings be back... + AIM, MSN, they even had a primitive IRC connection if memory serves me right.

jakecopp 5y ago

> While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. I'm unclear if it supports relay mode, but if so, you can invite Matrix, Signal, and WhatsApp users into the same group chat! [1] Edit: Relay mode is not currently supported in Element One, I tried it out. I contacted support and they said "we will discuss this internally and possibly enabled it later" I've been using this on my self-hosted version of the bridge and it does wonders for those friends who are on Signal but don't want to try another app. Also, a lot of people just don't want to swap between apps for direct messaging people on different services. This means you can use any Matrix compatible app [2] to chat with anyone on Matrix/WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram. [1]: https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/python/signal/relay-mode.md https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/python/s... [2]: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/

josteink 5y ago

> Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols It was not a not a service which was always on and synced between units. It was a client you had to run on your machine and keep connected. And it obviously didn’t roam. Pretty much an apples to oranges comparison. Matrix and Element aims to bring all those things you mention to a single protocol, to which you can connect any client you like, on any device you like, and roam as you like with all your clients always in sync. It’s what Pidgin used to deliver, levelled up and connected to the “modern” (read: closed) IM-silos the majority of people are using. It’s definitely different and it’s definitely interesting.

upofadown 5y ago

I think this is more like XMPP transports in that is is centralized at the server. Such things tended to end up centralized as it is a lot of work to keep up with the efforts of the people running the services to remain incompatible with the bridges. These days few XMPP servers bother with transports to commercial IM services. I suspect the same thing will happen in the Matrix case.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Transports work against your platform. Running a WhatsApp transport, you enhance WhatsApp's network effect and dilute your own.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Transports work for you when you're an upstart, because it makes it less risky for users to adopt your platform. They work against you only once you get significant market share. See e.g. Slack, which propelled itself to success by offering an IRC transport, which prevented strong opposition for technically inclined people, and then promptly killing it when they became a major player in the office IM space.

cookiengineer 5y ago

I thought about all that libpurple did back then, including OTR encryption that worked perfectly fine with others. These days I think that most services try to make money with stuff that was built decades ago already, and they're just keeping the reinventing cycle spinning. Anyone remember the franz app [1] ...which finally led to the hardfork of ferdi? [2] I feel that element one is franz all over again. [1] https://meetfranz.com https://meetfranz.com [2] https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

skinnymuch 5y ago
Franz was mainly just web views, no? Ferdi appears to be the same. This is different.

arp242 5y ago

> I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? I used Pidgin a lot. I always found it very convenient to have everything in one place and UI. Better one client than MSN + AOL + ICQ + IRC + Yahoo! + XMPP. In the last few years I haven't used it much, but that's because it just doesn't support the popular messaging apps of the day (or maybe it now does, I haven't checked in a while). Also, as others have pointed out, Pidgin is not and never has been a "service", it's just a library (libpurple) that implements various protocols, with Pidgin as the GUI (they also make Finch, a TUI).

oblio 5y ago
Pidgin was extremely convenient. But it was commoditizing messaging platforms so of course it had to be shot in the head by them.
- pi7h3n 5y ago
  who's them?
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    > messaging platforms No need to pretend that what the previous comment was saying is some kind of conspiracy when it's obvious that business gonna business.
    - pi7h3n 5y ago
      oof
- arp242 5y ago
  I don't think anything got "shot in the end"; the protocols of old were often just reverse-engineered too. Few bothered publishing anything about it, which is why Jabber/XMPP was created. Since then encryption made things a lot harder; specifically, E2E encryption. You can't "just" login to a server and send messages, you need to encrypt and decrypt things on the device with the right keys, and how do you handle things like message history WhatsApp and Signal solve this for the desktop/web versions by designating your phone as the only device that can connect to their service, and everything else communicates via that phone. Telegram solves it by having regular chats not be E2E encrypted, and having a special "secret chat" feature for it.

johnisgood 5y ago

Pidgin and Gajim.

h0nd 5y ago

Two decades ago I used trillian and mirianda for all the popular messaging protocols, https://trillian.im/ https://trillian.im/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/

luke2m 5y ago

Pidgin works with a surprising number of modern services [0]. I used it last year on my 32 bit computer that couldn’t run the official discord client.

mcjiggerlog 5y ago

There was a good recent episode of Late Night Linux Extra[0] where the maintainer talks about Pidgin and how it compares with Matrix. [0] https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32/ https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-extra-episode-32...

fimdomeio 5y ago

Back in the day and for a little while platforms companies thought to at least have a common language (xmpp). Then they thought it would be a better idea if we all had 10 different apps on our phones for text messages. There's no reason for standardization and interoperability not to be forced on these companies. When you sent a physical letter you have to follow some standards on the envelope addresses, when you make a phone call to the other side of the world people can still hear your voice, same for sms, same for email, but apparently sending a string of text via internet in a standard protocol is an unsolvable problem.

mehdix 5y ago
Companies must be forced to implement a subset of their features as part of some interoperability standard. The rest they can keep for their competitive advantage. I can't recall any industry who ever volunteered for this. Car makers didn't, telecoms didn't, software makers won't. No one did and they all exploited their users/customers to the fullest until they were forced to do so.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
think about this: WA protocol was simply XMPP with shorter labels (one character when possible)

Ntrails 5y ago

I still use pidgin regularly for various chat rooms and ircs etc. It is a great piece of kit imo

k1rcher 5y ago

Ah, XMPP + OTR. Brings back fond memories.

pmlnr 5y ago

There, it's still good: https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

tetrisgm 5y ago
I’d use the f out of this… if this was easy to setup. I’d like that but with one click and some settings things to sign.

briffle 5y ago

The Glory days, when both Google Talk and Facebook used XMPP, and you can run one client to chat with all of them. We ran Prosidy and Pidgin at my old job, and it worked great for our company chat server.

skinnymuch 5y ago
Facebook group chats were xmpp too? I thought they never were

ksec 5y ago

Everything old is new again.

klntsky 5y ago

I really love libpurple plugins for pidgin and how they can be combined. For example, I was able to communicate using OTR on vk.com (russian facebook clone). Probably other niche messaging plugins work with OTR too (it's just plaintext messages, after all).

ruffrey 5y ago

Fun fact, pidgin was developed by Mark Spencer, who also wrote Asterisk PBX and currently builds open source flight avionics.

estaseuropano 5y ago

I think Trillian was even older, and I think there were some KDE apps that did it even before that...

emilsedgh 5y ago
Kopete https://apps.kde.org/kopete/ https://apps.kde.org/kopete/

shmerl 5y ago

Pidgin is an IM client, not a service. A service would be something like XMPP servers (Google Talk used to be one and even federated until it went sideways).

gorgoiler 5y ago

Pidgin? Pffff! That’s some casual stuff right there. Real Scotsmen used bitlbee and irssi to enable their IRC addiction, long after everyone else had moved on to harder stuff. :)

niutech 5y ago

Now there is another open source alternative: Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge) connecting: Mattermost, IRC, Gitter, XMPP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Rocketchat, Twitch, SSH-chat, Zulip, WhatsApp, Keybase, Matrix, Microsoft Teams, NextCloud, Mumble, VK and more. The use case is simple: instead of using plethora of IM apps, have all your conversations in one place.

knocte 5y ago
Wow, this seems better than ElementOne?