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I really miss Adium (https://adium.im https://adium.im) which was based on Pidgin's libpurple. Adium had such a great user experience. It was built with native

by mdasen 5y ago

I really miss Adium (https://adium.im https://adium.im) which was based on Pidgin's libpurple. Adium had such a great user experience. It was built with native widgets and also incorporated chat themes that were implemented using WebKit's rendering (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=downloads https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...). It was fast and memory friendly given that it was a native app and the themes were just small templates offering a different rendering style (rather than the entire app being a huge JS/HTML/CSS React app). There were add-ons for message styles, contact list styles, dock icons, sounds, and more. It's really sad that we've lost the ability to connect to so many of the services we use with third party clients. Instead, I now have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Signal all running and taking up space in my dock.

Melatonic 5y ago
Yeah the days of integrated chat messengers seem to be dead. I loved Trillian way back when and all of the UI customization options.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
There also used to be plugins for iChat (which later became Messages) that added support for MSN Messenger, making for a no-fuss nicely streamlined chat experience across a decent range of networks (AIM, XMPP/Gchat, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger). So between modded iChat and Adium, on Mac OS you had the choice between minimal and kitchen-sink style IM clients, both of which were free and had no ads. OS X had also hit peak refinement around that time, between 10.2 and 10.6. It was a brief but golden age for Mac users with a lot of IM friends.
- qubex 5y ago
  I keep hoping that the next version of iOS will include the possibility of adding other instant messaging service backends as iMessage plugins. It would finally unify messaging on iOS.
- fumar 5y ago
  How did I forget about iChat? That brings back memories. Mac 10.4 to 10.6 was glorious. The walled gardens got higher and less fun over the 2010's. Discord works but I am probably one generation too old to appreciate the meme-heavy communication style.
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    iChat had multi-party video calls and virtual backgrounds in 2008. It blows my mind when Apple talks about multi-party FaceTime calls like it's a new feature.
    - lopis 5y ago
      We had actual video phone calls in 2005, and with the advent of Smartphones they were essentially deprecated. Eventually, Smartphones became capable of making video calls over the Internet with 3G
      - scarby2 5y ago
        It was 3G networks that enabled video calls from non smart phones back in 2005. The internet video chat didn't appear until later when HSDPA became a think
- labster 5y ago
  2010 was a great time. Adium for universal chat and XMPP federated services. You could find almost every movie on Netflix still. You could tell the difference between buttons and labels in UIs, and few hamburger menus were to be found. You could still get AppleWorks. Firefox wasn’t trying to sell you stuff. Televisions didn’t come preloaded with spyware. Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today. At least we don’t have IE6 any more, so it’s a fair trade.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today. You know it was thinking about that the other day, and i came to the conclusion that we're back in 1970, our powerful computers are mostly used as Terminals aka Browser connected to powerful monolithic service providers aka Mainframe. That means Ken Olsen was right and yes even Larry Ellison.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  What iChat plugins were there? I found this[1] for IRC but that's it (and I couldn't make it work despite being on an OS from the era). It looks like MSN Messenger didn't require a plugin, it worked because it was XMPP which iChat/Messages supported out of the box, up until High Sierra I think. 1: https://www.cocobit.software/support/ https://www.cocobit.software/support/
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Oh, I got IRC to work! Downloaded the example code from Apple's developer site and compiled: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/IRCServicePlugIn/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40011125 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/IRCSe... Then I had to run "killall imagent" in Terminal for it to work properly. Logged right into OFTC in Messages on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So... plugins were supported, but it may well be that the only plugin ever made was literally the example Apple released? :(
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    The MSN plugin was called Cocoon. Its page is available on archive.org[0], but unfortunately images are broken. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121118061309/http://cocoon.drinkbrainjuice.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121118061309/http://cocoon.dri...
vanshlanger 5y ago
definitely used Adium when I had a white macbook
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
I'd love to see what Adium's interface actually looked like, but apparently the website does not believe in screenshots. :(
- lproven 5y ago
  Er... does this help? https://adium.im/screenshots/ https://adium.im/screenshots/ I still have it installed. It was very useful in the PowerPC era. Pidgin still is useful: it talks to a whole bunch of services that are still alive... IRC, Telegram, Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, Rocket.chat, XMPP, ICQ, etc. Sadly Adium can't use Pidgin or Libpurple plugins directly. This severely reduces its usefulness today.
- mdasen 5y ago
  The website isn't well maintained anymore since we've kinda passed the days that people used multi-service clients. Here are some screenshots: https://www.adium.im/screenshots/images/overview.jpg https://www.adium.im/screenshots/images/overview.jpg The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via WebKit and you can change the theme easily. The Contacts list is also HTML in the middle so that's all theme-able too. https://images.six.betanews.com/screenshots/1110403338-1.jpg https://images.six.betanews.com/screenshots/1110403338-1.jpg Here's a Contacts list that's more compact and a chat window without the top toolbar. https://adium.im/screenshots/images/overvieworange.jpg https://adium.im/screenshots/images/overvieworange.jpg Here's a more radical theming where they've gotten rid of the window around the contact list so it's floating. If you go through the Adium Xtras, you can see all sorts of chat (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=downloads https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...), contact list (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=cats&cat_id=4&sort=downloads https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=cats&cat_id=4&sort=do...), and other ways of styling Adium.
  - Gualdrapo 5y ago
    > The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via WebKit and you can change the theme easily KDE's Kopete (and after that, the now defunct KDE Telepathy) could that too. Maybe GNOME's Empathy client could that too. I agree all of that was really cool. I sorely miss those all-in-one messengers completely integrated to the desktop.
hans1729 5y ago
> Instead, I now have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Signal all running and taking up space in my dock. Why don’t you use a matrix client with bridges? I use telegram, WhatsApp and signal over Element. The bridges are not as great as the individual clients, but it’s definitely miles ahead of using five messaging apps.
- olah_1 5y ago
  i think both Element matrix services and Beeper both offer this as a service now
- phone8675309 5y ago
  Honest question: when registering for those bridges is it just as simple as putting in your username/password or do you have to do other gyrations to make it work? Do you have to upgrade continually to avoid the services playing whack-a-mole with your bridges? I ask because I’d like to set up Matrix bridges like that locally, but if I have to create a Discord bot account or fish out an API key then that’s asking a bit much.
  - 3np 5y ago
    It depends on the bridge and protocol. IRC is as straightforward as any other IRC client. WhatsApp needs to run an actual WhatsApp client so you'll need an online iOS/Android device or run it a VM or emulator. Not sure about Discord. EDIT: If you can do without Discord DMs, you don't even need to run the bridge yourself or supply discord credentials - just invite a bot to a discord server if it isn't already https://t2bot.io/discord/ https://t2bot.io/discord/ (Obviously if you're concerned of privacy you wouldn't be having those conversations on Discord in the first place)
- mdasen 5y ago
  Maybe I'll look into it more, but it feels messy and complicated at first glance. Portal rooms, plumbed rooms, bridgebot bridges, Bot-API bridges, puppeted bridges, double-puppeted bridges, server-to-server briding, and sidecar bridges. I haven't used it so some of this may be wrong and I'm happy to accept corrections. It seems like a puppeted bridge requires me to send the messages to the Matrix server who then has a login to my FB Messenger to read/write messages there. I'm not going to run my own Matrix server so that requires me to trust a Matrix server with access to my Facebook. Yes, downloaded apps can be malware, but it's a lot more easily discoverable. One can use tools like Wireshark to confirm where data is going. If apps are open source, one can see the source code and even compile one's self. Even if you don't trust the maintainer who is compiling, you still have a good idea that they're not sending all your messages to them because someone is more likely to notice the binary doing that (via tools like Wireshark). When software is just run on a server that the public doesn't have access to, who knows what is happening. Yes, running on your machine doesn't mean everything is safe, but there's some level of inspection you can do of what is going on. I don't want to sound too down on Matrix, but it feels a bit off to me. It feels like people who want a decentralized future...where everyone is centralized into a small number of servers who can run a dozen or so Docker containers and such. Maybe that's the way the world needs to be given where we're at, but I just miss having a client that could login to multiple chat services. If these puppeted bridges can exist, why can't my client just puppet directly? Why send the message to the matrix server for the matrix server to then call the Facebook API? I remember the days of AIM breaking the OSCAR protocol and libpurple/libgaim needing to catch up so I understand that pushing out an update to client software might mean some extra hiccups in the connectivity. Still, it feels like the servers might not be able to update their software much faster than I am able to. Maybe App Store approvals holding up updates is the issue? Is the issue that app stores could block a Matrix + bridges client since it's clearly trying to access services that don't want third-party access, but a Matrix client that's just talking to a Metrix server is fine - and then the "infraction" is on a server that the App Store doesn't get a say over? (I'm not saying that I think it should be disallowed, but I could see companies disliking it) Is the issue that people want to write these bridges in JavaScript, Python, and other languages which are all fine if you're running a bunch of Docker containers on a server, but might not work so well if you're trying to create a desktop or mobile app? Why can Matrix bridge these things, but we can't have a libpurple that works as well as these bridges? Or maybe I just haven't used libpurple in a long time and it's actually still good and I should re-try it. It feels like Matrix wants to be a decentralizing force, but then the bridges force me to centralize my messaging through one of their servers. Again, maybe that's the way it needs to be for reasons, but it just doesn't feel like what I've been looking for.
xenophonf 5y ago
Does Adium not compile on newer versions of macOS? Development appears to have slowed down, but it doesn't look completely abandoned. I might try to feed it to Xcode on my hackintosh if only to see what kinds of errors crop up. That said, I've switched back to terminal-based IRC clients, so I haven't run either Pidgin or Adium in probably 10 years. It's sad. Both were really good tools.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Honestly, it's mostly a matter of Adium having lost its purpose. Most of the IM networks it originally interacted with no longer exist or are no longer open to third-party clients, and the ones that remain (mostly XMPP and IRC) aren't necessarily a great fit for Adium.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    I’ve been surprised recently by the availability of plugins for libpurple (the lib on which Adium is based) which supports Telegram, Signal, Facebook …
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Modern IM networks aren't a great fit for libpurple because they fundamentally work differently. "Old-school" IM networks like AIM were simple to work with from a client perspective -- you connect to the network, you send and receive messages, and that's it. There was no real support for server-side message history, multiple clients, mobile clients, or offline messaging, so third-party clients often just implemented their own local history instead. Newer IM networks like Telegram are usually designed from a mobile-first perspective -- the Telegram client protocol is designed around the concept that the server has a definitive view of history across all chats, and the client synchronizes portions of that history to local storage to display it. It certainly isn't impossible to adapt this to a design like libpurple/Adium/etc, but it's an awkward fit and is likely to fail to support features which don't fit into that model, like chat messages being edited or deleted by the other party in the conversation.
bergie 5y ago
The messaging app on the Nokia N900 was also based on libpurple. You had all of your Google Talk and Skype contacts and chats, together with SMS in a single place.
- wjt 5y ago
  It was based on Telepathy https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/. None of the built-in backends for XMPP, SIP, Skype and cellular calls used libpurple. (A libpurple-based backend could be installed from the community app repo.)
  - pabs3 5y ago
    I wish Telepathy got more popularity, it seemed to be a better architecture than Pidgin/libpurple with the protocol support in separate processes etc.
    - wjt 5y ago
      Well, me too, having spent the best part of half a decade working on it! But I broadly agree with Rob McQueen's assessment of how the architecture turned out to be fatally flawed. http://web.archive.org/web/20210427061305/https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-September/msg00047.html http://web.archive.org/web/20210427061305/https://mail.gnome...
      - pabs3 5y ago
        The crashes I still experience in libpurple backends today still lead me to prefer the Telepathy architecture.
Apocryphon 5y ago
There's still third party clients. I use Ferdi, which is the open-source equivalent to Franz and Rambox.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  That’s just opening tabs with each chat service. Not dissimilar to doing that yourself with browser tabs. Which is basically what the clients you mentioned do
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
The ironic thing is the protocols are now almost all dirt simple but I perceive the risk of being C&D’d for making alternative clients to not be worth the risk.
- Kye 5y ago
  AOL definitely took issue with gaim, which was Pidgin's old name from when it was mainly an AIM client. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...
  - rincebrain 5y ago
    AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name. But naim was such a nice client before finch was really a thing. (No, I never did anything more exciting than have private conversations with individuals that might provoke this, and it tended to happen to swathes of people using third-party clients at once.)
    - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
      I used my third party client for a few years circa 2003. I think after more services entered the fray (MSN/Yahoo) they eased up.
    - wolrah 5y ago
      > AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name. Weird, I used Trillian on Windows and Adium on Mac exclusively for years, from 2004 through some time in the mid 2010s when all of my old AIM and ICQ contacts had moved on to Steam and then later Discord. Never had any issues other than the usual stuff where file transfers and the like weren't reliable with third party clients.
heavyset_go 5y ago
That time period was magical for interoperability of services, P2P and open protocols. The tech landscape today would look much different if the principles of that era were adhered to today. Instead, the "interoperability" we get today is the result of multibillion dollar corporations making partnerships with each other, while independent developers are locked out. As an example, Google gets access to streaming services APIs and catalogs in order to fill their Chromecast and AndroidTV products' menus with movies and shows. Meanwhile, Kodi has to rely on hacks to do something similar, it doesn't work with all streaming services, and there might not be feature parity.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  Does the European DMA law indicate a possible return of this? It sounds like Europe is about to require interoperability between Facebook Messenger-likes and other clients.
  - mike_d 5y ago
    Likely not. You'll just see everyone fall back to supporting SMS like iMessages does. There is no way to regulate an equivalent level of service and features be provided on a platform you don't control.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    I wonder if this will result in RCS becoming the standard, or maybe Matrix or XMPP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      I wonder if these companies are still using XMPP: Google and Facebook for a while even would allow XMPP servers to federate
ei8ths 5y ago
seriously, i miss those days of putting them all under one app.
pabs3 5y ago
Pidgin has plugins for a lot of those protocols now, notably not iMessage though. https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
Adium :), that brings back long forgotten memories from ~2003, staying up late to chat with friends about conspiracy theories and other asinine things no doubt.
ynx 5y ago
IIRC I remember meeting an Adium dev at a WWDC. A condition of joining Apple was that he could no longer work on or contribute to Adium in any way. Typical Apple stuff.
damagednoob 5y ago
> It's really sad that we've lost the ability to connect to so many of the services we use with third party clients. https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/

by mdasen 5y ago

Melatonic 5y ago

Yeah the days of integrated chat messengers seem to be dead. I loved Trillian way back when and all of the UI customization options.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

There also used to be plugins for iChat (which later became Messages) that added support for MSN Messenger, making for a no-fuss nicely streamlined chat experience across a decent range of networks (AIM, XMPP/Gchat, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger). So between modded iChat and Adium, on Mac OS you had the choice between minimal and kitchen-sink style IM clients, both of which were free and had no ads. OS X had also hit peak refinement around that time, between 10.2 and 10.6. It was a brief but golden age for Mac users with a lot of IM friends.

qubex 5y ago
I keep hoping that the next version of iOS will include the possibility of adding other instant messaging service backends as iMessage plugins. It would finally unify messaging on iOS.
fumar 5y ago
How did I forget about iChat? That brings back memories. Mac 10.4 to 10.6 was glorious. The walled gardens got higher and less fun over the 2010's. Discord works but I am probably one generation too old to appreciate the meme-heavy communication style.
- eddieroger 5y ago
  iChat had multi-party video calls and virtual backgrounds in 2008. It blows my mind when Apple talks about multi-party FaceTime calls like it's a new feature.
  - lopis 5y ago
    We had actual video phone calls in 2005, and with the advent of Smartphones they were essentially deprecated. Eventually, Smartphones became capable of making video calls over the Internet with 3G
    - scarby2 5y ago
      It was 3G networks that enabled video calls from non smart phones back in 2005. The internet video chat didn't appear until later when HSDPA became a think
labster 5y ago
2010 was a great time. Adium for universal chat and XMPP federated services. You could find almost every movie on Netflix still. You could tell the difference between buttons and labels in UIs, and few hamburger menus were to be found. You could still get AppleWorks. Firefox wasn’t trying to sell you stuff. Televisions didn’t come preloaded with spyware. Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today. At least we don’t have IE6 any more, so it’s a fair trade.
- nix23 5y ago
  >Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today. You know it was thinking about that the other day, and i came to the conclusion that we're back in 1970, our powerful computers are mostly used as Terminals aka Browser connected to powerful monolithic service providers aka Mainframe. That means Ken Olsen was right and yes even Larry Ellison.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
What iChat plugins were there? I found this[1] for IRC but that's it (and I couldn't make it work despite being on an OS from the era). It looks like MSN Messenger didn't require a plugin, it worked because it was XMPP which iChat/Messages supported out of the box, up until High Sierra I think. 1: https://www.cocobit.software/support/ https://www.cocobit.software/support/
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Oh, I got IRC to work! Downloaded the example code from Apple's developer site and compiled: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/IRCServicePlugIn/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40011125 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/IRCSe... Then I had to run "killall imagent" in Terminal for it to work properly. Logged right into OFTC in Messages on OS X 10.9 Mavericks. So... plugins were supported, but it may well be that the only plugin ever made was literally the example Apple released? :(
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  The MSN plugin was called Cocoon. Its page is available on archive.org[0], but unfortunately images are broken. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121118061309/http://cocoon.drinkbrainjuice.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20121118061309/http://cocoon.dri...

vanshlanger 5y ago

definitely used Adium when I had a white macbook

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

I'd love to see what Adium's interface actually looked like, but apparently the website does not believe in screenshots. :(

lproven 5y ago
Er... does this help? https://adium.im/screenshots/ https://adium.im/screenshots/ I still have it installed. It was very useful in the PowerPC era. Pidgin still is useful: it talks to a whole bunch of services that are still alive... IRC, Telegram, Skype, Google Hangouts, Slack, Rocket.chat, XMPP, ICQ, etc. Sadly Adium can't use Pidgin or Libpurple plugins directly. This severely reduces its usefulness today.
mdasen 5y ago
The website isn't well maintained anymore since we've kinda passed the days that people used multi-service clients. Here are some screenshots: https://www.adium.im/screenshots/images/overview.jpg https://www.adium.im/screenshots/images/overview.jpg The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via WebKit and you can change the theme easily. The Contacts list is also HTML in the middle so that's all theme-able too. https://images.six.betanews.com/screenshots/1110403338-1.jpg https://images.six.betanews.com/screenshots/1110403338-1.jpg Here's a Contacts list that's more compact and a chat window without the top toolbar. https://adium.im/screenshots/images/overvieworange.jpg https://adium.im/screenshots/images/overvieworange.jpg Here's a more radical theming where they've gotten rid of the window around the contact list so it's floating. If you go through the Adium Xtras, you can see all sorts of chat (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=downloads https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...), contact list (https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=cats&cat_id=4&sort=downloads https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=cats&cat_id=4&sort=do...), and other ways of styling Adium.
- Gualdrapo 5y ago
  > The area inside the chat window is HTML rendered via WebKit and you can change the theme easily KDE's Kopete (and after that, the now defunct KDE Telepathy) could that too. Maybe GNOME's Empathy client could that too. I agree all of that was really cool. I sorely miss those all-in-one messengers completely integrated to the desktop.

hans1729 5y ago

> Instead, I now have FB Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord, and Signal all running and taking up space in my dock. Why don’t you use a matrix client with bridges? I use telegram, WhatsApp and signal over Element. The bridges are not as great as the individual clients, but it’s definitely miles ahead of using five messaging apps.

olah_1 5y ago
i think both Element matrix services and Beeper both offer this as a service now
phone8675309 5y ago
Honest question: when registering for those bridges is it just as simple as putting in your username/password or do you have to do other gyrations to make it work? Do you have to upgrade continually to avoid the services playing whack-a-mole with your bridges? I ask because I’d like to set up Matrix bridges like that locally, but if I have to create a Discord bot account or fish out an API key then that’s asking a bit much.
- 3np 5y ago
  It depends on the bridge and protocol. IRC is as straightforward as any other IRC client. WhatsApp needs to run an actual WhatsApp client so you'll need an online iOS/Android device or run it a VM or emulator. Not sure about Discord. EDIT: If you can do without Discord DMs, you don't even need to run the bridge yourself or supply discord credentials - just invite a bot to a discord server if it isn't already https://t2bot.io/discord/ https://t2bot.io/discord/ (Obviously if you're concerned of privacy you wouldn't be having those conversations on Discord in the first place)
mdasen 5y ago
Maybe I'll look into it more, but it feels messy and complicated at first glance. Portal rooms, plumbed rooms, bridgebot bridges, Bot-API bridges, puppeted bridges, double-puppeted bridges, server-to-server briding, and sidecar bridges. I haven't used it so some of this may be wrong and I'm happy to accept corrections. It seems like a puppeted bridge requires me to send the messages to the Matrix server who then has a login to my FB Messenger to read/write messages there. I'm not going to run my own Matrix server so that requires me to trust a Matrix server with access to my Facebook. Yes, downloaded apps can be malware, but it's a lot more easily discoverable. One can use tools like Wireshark to confirm where data is going. If apps are open source, one can see the source code and even compile one's self. Even if you don't trust the maintainer who is compiling, you still have a good idea that they're not sending all your messages to them because someone is more likely to notice the binary doing that (via tools like Wireshark). When software is just run on a server that the public doesn't have access to, who knows what is happening. Yes, running on your machine doesn't mean everything is safe, but there's some level of inspection you can do of what is going on. I don't want to sound too down on Matrix, but it feels a bit off to me. It feels like people who want a decentralized future...where everyone is centralized into a small number of servers who can run a dozen or so Docker containers and such. Maybe that's the way the world needs to be given where we're at, but I just miss having a client that could login to multiple chat services. If these puppeted bridges can exist, why can't my client just puppet directly? Why send the message to the matrix server for the matrix server to then call the Facebook API? I remember the days of AIM breaking the OSCAR protocol and libpurple/libgaim needing to catch up so I understand that pushing out an update to client software might mean some extra hiccups in the connectivity. Still, it feels like the servers might not be able to update their software much faster than I am able to. Maybe App Store approvals holding up updates is the issue? Is the issue that app stores could block a Matrix + bridges client since it's clearly trying to access services that don't want third-party access, but a Matrix client that's just talking to a Metrix server is fine - and then the "infraction" is on a server that the App Store doesn't get a say over? (I'm not saying that I think it should be disallowed, but I could see companies disliking it) Is the issue that people want to write these bridges in JavaScript, Python, and other languages which are all fine if you're running a bunch of Docker containers on a server, but might not work so well if you're trying to create a desktop or mobile app? Why can Matrix bridge these things, but we can't have a libpurple that works as well as these bridges? Or maybe I just haven't used libpurple in a long time and it's actually still good and I should re-try it. It feels like Matrix wants to be a decentralizing force, but then the bridges force me to centralize my messaging through one of their servers. Again, maybe that's the way it needs to be for reasons, but it just doesn't feel like what I've been looking for.

xenophonf 5y ago

Does Adium not compile on newer versions of macOS? Development appears to have slowed down, but it doesn't look completely abandoned. I might try to feed it to Xcode on my hackintosh if only to see what kinds of errors crop up. That said, I've switched back to terminal-based IRC clients, so I haven't run either Pidgin or Adium in probably 10 years. It's sad. Both were really good tools.

duskwuff 5y ago
Honestly, it's mostly a matter of Adium having lost its purpose. Most of the IM networks it originally interacted with no longer exist or are no longer open to third-party clients, and the ones that remain (mostly XMPP and IRC) aren't necessarily a great fit for Adium.
- pjerem 5y ago
  I’ve been surprised recently by the availability of plugins for libpurple (the lib on which Adium is based) which supports Telegram, Signal, Facebook …
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Modern IM networks aren't a great fit for libpurple because they fundamentally work differently. "Old-school" IM networks like AIM were simple to work with from a client perspective -- you connect to the network, you send and receive messages, and that's it. There was no real support for server-side message history, multiple clients, mobile clients, or offline messaging, so third-party clients often just implemented their own local history instead. Newer IM networks like Telegram are usually designed from a mobile-first perspective -- the Telegram client protocol is designed around the concept that the server has a definitive view of history across all chats, and the client synchronizes portions of that history to local storage to display it. It certainly isn't impossible to adapt this to a design like libpurple/Adium/etc, but it's an awkward fit and is likely to fail to support features which don't fit into that model, like chat messages being edited or deleted by the other party in the conversation.

bergie 5y ago

The messaging app on the Nokia N900 was also based on libpurple. You had all of your Google Talk and Skype contacts and chats, together with SMS in a single place.

wjt 5y ago
It was based on Telepathy https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/ https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/. None of the built-in backends for XMPP, SIP, Skype and cellular calls used libpurple. (A libpurple-based backend could be installed from the community app repo.)
- pabs3 5y ago
  I wish Telepathy got more popularity, it seemed to be a better architecture than Pidgin/libpurple with the protocol support in separate processes etc.
  - wjt 5y ago
    Well, me too, having spent the best part of half a decade working on it! But I broadly agree with Rob McQueen's assessment of how the architecture turned out to be fatally flawed. http://web.archive.org/web/20210427061305/https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2017-September/msg00047.html http://web.archive.org/web/20210427061305/https://mail.gnome...
    - pabs3 5y ago
      The crashes I still experience in libpurple backends today still lead me to prefer the Telepathy architecture.

Apocryphon 5y ago

There's still third party clients. I use Ferdi, which is the open-source equivalent to Franz and Rambox.

skinnymuch 5y ago
That’s just opening tabs with each chat service. Not dissimilar to doing that yourself with browser tabs. Which is basically what the clients you mentioned do

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

The ironic thing is the protocols are now almost all dirt simple but I perceive the risk of being C&D’d for making alternative clients to not be worth the risk.

Kye 5y ago
AOL definitely took issue with gaim, which was Pidgin's old name from when it was mainly an AIM client. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)#Naming_dispu...
- rincebrain 5y ago
  AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name. But naim was such a nice client before finch was really a thing. (No, I never did anything more exciting than have private conversations with individuals that might provoke this, and it tended to happen to swathes of people using third-party clients at once.)
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    I used my third party client for a few years circa 2003. I think after more services entered the fray (MSN/Yahoo) they eased up.
  - wolrah 5y ago
    > AOL took issue with most third-party clients - I and a number of other users would periodically get permanently banned from AIM, apparently for the sole crime of using a third-party client they could notice. My friends got used to every 6-12 months seeing that I was messaging them from a new name. Weird, I used Trillian on Windows and Adium on Mac exclusively for years, from 2004 through some time in the mid 2010s when all of my old AIM and ICQ contacts had moved on to Steam and then later Discord. Never had any issues other than the usual stuff where file transfers and the like weren't reliable with third party clients.

heavyset_go 5y ago

That time period was magical for interoperability of services, P2P and open protocols. The tech landscape today would look much different if the principles of that era were adhered to today. Instead, the "interoperability" we get today is the result of multibillion dollar corporations making partnerships with each other, while independent developers are locked out. As an example, Google gets access to streaming services APIs and catalogs in order to fill their Chromecast and AndroidTV products' menus with movies and shows. Meanwhile, Kodi has to rely on hacks to do something similar, it doesn't work with all streaming services, and there might not be feature parity.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Does the European DMA law indicate a possible return of this? It sounds like Europe is about to require interoperability between Facebook Messenger-likes and other clients.
- mike_d 5y ago
  Likely not. You'll just see everyone fall back to supporting SMS like iMessages does. There is no way to regulate an equivalent level of service and features be provided on a platform you don't control.
- pabs3 5y ago
  I wonder if this will result in RCS becoming the standard, or maybe Matrix or XMPP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    I wonder if these companies are still using XMPP: Google and Facebook for a while even would allow XMPP servers to federate

ei8ths 5y ago

seriously, i miss those days of putting them all under one app.

pabs3 5y ago

Pidgin has plugins for a lot of those protocols now, notably not iMessage though. https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

Adium :), that brings back long forgotten memories from ~2003, staying up late to chat with friends about conspiracy theories and other asinine things no doubt.

ynx 5y ago

IIRC I remember meeting an Adium dev at a WWDC. A condition of joining Apple was that he could no longer work on or contribute to Adium in any way. Typical Apple stuff.

damagednoob 5y ago

> It's really sad that we've lost the ability to connect to so many of the services we use with third party clients. https://meetfranz.com/ https://meetfranz.com/