7 ms·

Q: What happened to Pidgin? A: Google & Facebook shut down their XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you can no longer use Pidgin to comm

Q: What happened to Pidgin? A: Google & Facebook shut down their XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you can no longer use Pidgin to communicate with people on google & facebook. At least that was my experience. I used to use Pidgin with OTR[0] for e2e encrypted chat over google & facebook. It was pretty fantastic, messages were inaccessible to facebook and google even with a court order so I didn't need to trust them. Also used Finch for a bit[1]. For a time I had a pretty great setup on a local VM (running the PHP app I was working on): one tmux tab with work, another with a pane for finch (for chatting on FB & google), a pane for IRC, and a third pane for ttytter[2], the amazing twitter CLI. If someone nontechnical walked by they'd see a terminal and it looked exactly like I was working, not chatting on IRC & facebook, and looking at twitter :D 0: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ 1: https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-finch/ https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-finch/ 2: https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/ https://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Plus one for OTR. It was a bit awkward to do key exchange and validation but otherwise great once set.
pabs3 5y ago
Pidgin has plugins for Google and Facebook now. https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ BTW, OTRv3 has pretty poor security these days, there is OTRv4 but it isn't ready for users yet. https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4
- joecot 5y ago
  I went to try the Pidgin Facebook plugin, and I couldn't login. There's no more app passwords as the plugin suggests, if you try to login without the 2 factor Facebook sends "Is This You?" notifications every time, but doesn't let you login if you say yes. There's github issue[1] for it and no resolution, except a weird python script hack to do 2 factor which may or may not be reliable. 1. https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526 https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  FB one doesn’t provide group chats as far as I’m aware. Maybe not Google one either?

paulryanrogers 5y ago

Plus one for OTR. It was a bit awkward to do key exchange and validation but otherwise great once set.

pabs3 5y ago

Pidgin has plugins for Google and Facebook now. https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ BTW, OTRv3 has pretty poor security these days, there is OTRv4 but it isn't ready for users yet. https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4

joecot 5y ago
I went to try the Pidgin Facebook plugin, and I couldn't login. There's no more app passwords as the plugin suggests, if you try to login without the 2 factor Facebook sends "Is This You?" notifications every time, but doesn't let you login if you say yes. There's github issue[1] for it and no resolution, except a weird python script hack to do 2 factor which may or may not be reliable. 1. https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526 https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook/issues/526
skinnymuch 5y ago
FB one doesn’t provide group chats as far as I’m aware. Maybe not Google one either?