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There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber

There was a brief period in the aughts when Pidgin and libpurple covered almost all messaging platforms in a single application. AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Jabber, IRC, you name it. You could even layer on encryption with the OTR plugin, message logging, automation and countless other plugins. At the time I took this for granted and didn't appreciate just how wonderful it was.

djha-skin 4y ago
It took a while, but it's gotten pretty good again. Harder to get plugins running than it used to be, but now there's Slack, Matrix, Teams, and (shameless plug) GroupMe[1]. Works well enough for me these days :) 1: https://github.com/djhaskin987/groupme-purple https://github.com/djhaskin987/groupme-purple . Kudos to its original author, Alyssa Rosenzweig :)
- rw_grim 4y ago
  Looks like I need to update this page then :-D https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=groupme&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=groupme&type=...
paulryanrogers 4y ago
With TTS and STT it felt like a super power
- netsharc 4y ago
  On the topic of super powers, I remember using a Pidgin plug-in that would pop-up a chat window if someone is typing a message for you, even before they sent their first message. That's because their client was sending a "User is typing..." signal. The plug-in would notice this signal, open the chat window and notify you with the sentence "You feel a disturbance in the force..."
  - anthk 4y ago
    Psychic mode?
- anthk 4y ago
  I remember a Pidgin plugin to translate the incoming messages inline. Also the same for the ones you sent.
l72 4y ago
Don't forget facebook and google chat (when they were both jabber based)
grubbs 4y ago
Company I worked for from 2012-2016 still uses the OpenFire + Pidgin approach for internal IM that I set up around 2013-ish. I couldn't pry it from their hands. All the employees loved it. OTR did work well. But causes some small issues with other plugins. I still love how customizable everything was. Both on the server and client.
chipx86 4y ago
I used to work on Gaim/Pidgin (and in fact created libgaim/libpurple) back in my college days. It was easier for us to build and maintain back then. We had push-back from some of the companies (Yahoo being notoriously aggressive about it, to the point of actively banning our developers' accounts and inventing new obfuscated auth schemes all the time), but from a technical standpoint: 1. Most of these were communicating over plain text channels (making it easy to sniff traffic from official clients) 2. The protocols were generally understandable (MSN for a long time was largely all MIME-based messages, and could be understood by watching a traffic stream) 3. Used simple usernames/passwords for authentication (just fewer hoops to jump through) It's a different world nowadays, with more focus on keeping you in the chat environment and offering additional features as part of that experience. Harder to abstract a lot of that out. That said, Gary Kramlich's been working on this diligently. (If interested, he also regularly streams development over at https://www.twitch.tv/rw_grim https://www.twitch.tv/rw_grim).
- userbinator 4y ago
  The protocols were generally understandable (MSN for a long time was largely all MIME-based messages, and could be understood by watching a traffic stream) Microsoft even submitted an early draft of MSNP to the IETF. I'd consider (at least the early versions) MSNP the next step up in complexity from IRC, i.e. you can write a working client with both presence and messaging within a day or two. This is from experience of having written a client myself, which I used all the way up to them shutting down the servers. Used simple usernames/passwords for authentication (just fewer hoops to jump through) Earliest ones were literally plain user/pass, then followed challenge-response, and later MSNP used something surprisingly similar to OAuth, where you authenticate out-of-band to get a token that is then submitted to the protocol server itself.
  - chipx86 4y ago
    Very cool! Which client did you write? I had forgotten they tried to standardize the protocol! Yeah, it was surprisingly easy. Connect to the switchboard server, set up sessions from there, and then it's all MIME. We even implemented avatars for Gaim by chunking Base64-encoded images over MIME messages (they had a max length), which MSN would ignore but Gaim would use. We never had any trouble from the MSN team. Rumor had it at the time that at least one dev on the team was secretly a Gaim user, and they just looked the other way.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
Begrudgingly-former Adium (~Mac equivalent of Pidgin) user here: it was glorious indeed! I didn’t take it for granted because I had already been using the prior iteration of incompatible chat apps soup, and I clung to it far longer than most reasonable people would as it became a ghost town on supported protocols. The biggest exodus at the time (from my perspective) was when Google closed up whatever their current branded chat service was. But the real nail in the coffin (again from my perspective) was Slack, for the fairly obvious reasons that chat is their primary product and active/paying users is their primary product. Of course the rise of other chat-first apps successful with the youngs, and well positioned instant incumbents from social media, the coffin had many nails. But it really is a shame this era came to an end. I don’t know how it could have gone differently given the incentives and circumstances, but I’d go back to those tradeoffs (basically everything works in one native app where I can talk to anyone I know however I want to, but probably direct file transfers are gonna fail most of the time) in a heartbeat.
- corndoge 4y ago
  Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.
  - rw_grim 4y ago
    We're still here!! And there's a ton of support for stuff via third party protocols. I know it's not ideal, but things will get easier when Pidgin 3 finally gets closer to a release. See this page for a list of all the third party protocol support https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
    - corndoge 4y ago
      Great to hear it's alive and kicking!
  - grishka 4y ago
mindcrime 4y ago
I still use Pidgin regularly to this very day. Of course I only really use it for XMPP, but I did actually configure it to connect to my old ICQ account a while back. Unfortunately is seems to have quit working sometime or other. Think I'm being bit by this: https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27 https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27 No big loss, I think there was like 1 other person in my ICQ contacts list that was still showing as online every now and then. Still, it's a neat nostalgia indulgence to connect to ICQ after all these years... EDIT: I rebuilt icyque from the latest sources and it appears that I can once again enjoy the wonderful world of ICQ! If anybody wants to chat, I'm 17109168 on ICQ.
- navigate8310 4y ago
  Check this out: https://nina.chat/ https://nina.chat/ Nina/Escargot are working to bring back Aim, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN messenger via a new opensource cross-chatting unified system.
pabs3 4y ago
Pidgin still has a ton of modern messaging platform plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ OTR is sadly fairly dead; broken encryption, OTRv4 isn't out of beta yet.
- toastal 4y ago
  Looks like OMEMO support hasn't landed either https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 The Pidgin/libpurple team has a lot to handle as all of these proprietary chat options are constantly moving targets and trying to maintain feature parity on all of them. At least the FOSS options have publicly-documented specs and aren't actively hostile towards reverse engineering.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    OMEMO is for XMPP only so not as useful as OTR, but there is already a plugin for it: https://github.com/gkdr/lurch https://github.com/gkdr/lurch
    - toastal 4y ago
      Awesome. I hadn't seen that. I remember using OTR in the past and switching from machines didn't really work, but the multi-client support that OMEMO brings though is pretty critical in a time where a most have multiple devices. Is this something v4 brings?
      - pabs3 4y ago
        Not sure, there is a copy of the draft for it here (original seems down): https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4/ https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4/
anthk 4y ago
Libpurple + local IRC server = Bitlbee. It's still amazing to be able to chat with everyone from everywhere, even a potato from early 90's.
captainmuon 4y ago
Back in the day I also used Miranda, a lightweight multiplatform messenger for Windows which I liked a lot. And later, Pidgin on Linux. The status messages on ICQ and MSN were neat and anticipated Twitter for me. What made it difficult for me was the added features of certain platforms. ICQ had little games and fancy emojis, and if somebody sent them to you you would miss it. I was really afraid to miss important social interactions :-). Also these apps didn't make the move to mobile, unfortunately.
the_gipsy 4y ago
You might want to check out matrix.org. It's its own protocol, so there is no "universal client" like pidgin. However you can easily host a homeserver and "bridge" a lot of protocols. Personally I only have tried telegram, and it works quite well for what it is. Since all the modern chat apps are not open protocols, the bridges usually work over some kind of limited bot APIs.

djha-skin 4y ago

It took a while, but it's gotten pretty good again. Harder to get plugins running than it used to be, but now there's Slack, Matrix, Teams, and (shameless plug) GroupMe[1]. Works well enough for me these days :) 1: https://github.com/djhaskin987/groupme-purple https://github.com/djhaskin987/groupme-purple . Kudos to its original author, Alyssa Rosenzweig :)

rw_grim 4y ago
Looks like I need to update this page then :-D https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=groupme&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=groupme&type=...

paulryanrogers 4y ago

With TTS and STT it felt like a super power

netsharc 4y ago
On the topic of super powers, I remember using a Pidgin plug-in that would pop-up a chat window if someone is typing a message for you, even before they sent their first message. That's because their client was sending a "User is typing..." signal. The plug-in would notice this signal, open the chat window and notify you with the sentence "You feel a disturbance in the force..."
- anthk 4y ago
  Psychic mode?
anthk 4y ago
I remember a Pidgin plugin to translate the incoming messages inline. Also the same for the ones you sent.

l72 4y ago

Don't forget facebook and google chat (when they were both jabber based)

grubbs 4y ago

Company I worked for from 2012-2016 still uses the OpenFire + Pidgin approach for internal IM that I set up around 2013-ish. I couldn't pry it from their hands. All the employees loved it. OTR did work well. But causes some small issues with other plugins. I still love how customizable everything was. Both on the server and client.

chipx86 4y ago

I used to work on Gaim/Pidgin (and in fact created libgaim/libpurple) back in my college days. It was easier for us to build and maintain back then. We had push-back from some of the companies (Yahoo being notoriously aggressive about it, to the point of actively banning our developers' accounts and inventing new obfuscated auth schemes all the time), but from a technical standpoint: 1. Most of these were communicating over plain text channels (making it easy to sniff traffic from official clients) 2. The protocols were generally understandable (MSN for a long time was largely all MIME-based messages, and could be understood by watching a traffic stream) 3. Used simple usernames/passwords for authentication (just fewer hoops to jump through) It's a different world nowadays, with more focus on keeping you in the chat environment and offering additional features as part of that experience. Harder to abstract a lot of that out. That said, Gary Kramlich's been working on this diligently. (If interested, he also regularly streams development over at https://www.twitch.tv/rw_grim https://www.twitch.tv/rw_grim).

userbinator 4y ago
The protocols were generally understandable (MSN for a long time was largely all MIME-based messages, and could be understood by watching a traffic stream) Microsoft even submitted an early draft of MSNP to the IETF. I'd consider (at least the early versions) MSNP the next step up in complexity from IRC, i.e. you can write a working client with both presence and messaging within a day or two. This is from experience of having written a client myself, which I used all the way up to them shutting down the servers. Used simple usernames/passwords for authentication (just fewer hoops to jump through) Earliest ones were literally plain user/pass, then followed challenge-response, and later MSNP used something surprisingly similar to OAuth, where you authenticate out-of-band to get a token that is then submitted to the protocol server itself.
- chipx86 4y ago
  Very cool! Which client did you write? I had forgotten they tried to standardize the protocol! Yeah, it was surprisingly easy. Connect to the switchboard server, set up sessions from there, and then it's all MIME. We even implemented avatars for Gaim by chunking Base64-encoded images over MIME messages (they had a max length), which MSN would ignore but Gaim would use. We never had any trouble from the MSN team. Rumor had it at the time that at least one dev on the team was secretly a Gaim user, and they just looked the other way.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

Begrudgingly-former Adium (~Mac equivalent of Pidgin) user here: it was glorious indeed! I didn’t take it for granted because I had already been using the prior iteration of incompatible chat apps soup, and I clung to it far longer than most reasonable people would as it became a ghost town on supported protocols. The biggest exodus at the time (from my perspective) was when Google closed up whatever their current branded chat service was. But the real nail in the coffin (again from my perspective) was Slack, for the fairly obvious reasons that chat is their primary product and active/paying users is their primary product. Of course the rise of other chat-first apps successful with the youngs, and well positioned instant incumbents from social media, the coffin had many nails. But it really is a shame this era came to an end. I don’t know how it could have gone differently given the incentives and circumstances, but I’d go back to those tradeoffs (basically everything works in one native app where I can talk to anyone I know however I want to, but probably direct file transfers are gonna fail most of the time) in a heartbeat.

corndoge 4y ago
Matrix is working on bringing that world back, and works pretty well, although configuring a homeserver with the necessary bridges is more difficult than pidgin was.
- rw_grim 4y ago
  We're still here!! And there's a ton of support for stuff via third party protocols. I know it's not ideal, but things will get easier when Pidgin 3 finally gets closer to a release. See this page for a list of all the third party protocol support https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protocol https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
  - corndoge 4y ago
    Great to hear it's alive and kicking!
- grishka 4y ago

mindcrime 4y ago

I still use Pidgin regularly to this very day. Of course I only really use it for XMPP, but I did actually configure it to connect to my old ICQ account a while back. Unfortunately is seems to have quit working sometime or other. Think I'm being bit by this: https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27 https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque/issues/27 No big loss, I think there was like 1 other person in my ICQ contacts list that was still showing as online every now and then. Still, it's a neat nostalgia indulgence to connect to ICQ after all these years... EDIT: I rebuilt icyque from the latest sources and it appears that I can once again enjoy the wonderful world of ICQ! If anybody wants to chat, I'm 17109168 on ICQ.

navigate8310 4y ago
Check this out: https://nina.chat/ https://nina.chat/ Nina/Escargot are working to bring back Aim, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger and MSN messenger via a new opensource cross-chatting unified system.

pabs3 4y ago

Pidgin still has a ton of modern messaging platform plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ OTR is sadly fairly dead; broken encryption, OTRv4 isn't out of beta yet.

toastal 4y ago
Looks like OMEMO support hasn't landed either https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-16801 The Pidgin/libpurple team has a lot to handle as all of these proprietary chat options are constantly moving targets and trying to maintain feature parity on all of them. At least the FOSS options have publicly-documented specs and aren't actively hostile towards reverse engineering.
- pabs3 4y ago
  OMEMO is for XMPP only so not as useful as OTR, but there is already a plugin for it: https://github.com/gkdr/lurch https://github.com/gkdr/lurch
  - toastal 4y ago
    Awesome. I hadn't seen that. I remember using OTR in the past and switching from machines didn't really work, but the multi-client support that OMEMO brings though is pretty critical in a time where a most have multiple devices. Is this something v4 brings?
    - pabs3 4y ago
      Not sure, there is a copy of the draft for it here (original seems down): https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4/ https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4/

anthk 4y ago

Libpurple + local IRC server = Bitlbee. It's still amazing to be able to chat with everyone from everywhere, even a potato from early 90's.

captainmuon 4y ago

Back in the day I also used Miranda, a lightweight multiplatform messenger for Windows which I liked a lot. And later, Pidgin on Linux. The status messages on ICQ and MSN were neat and anticipated Twitter for me. What made it difficult for me was the added features of certain platforms. ICQ had little games and fancy emojis, and if somebody sent them to you you would miss it. I was really afraid to miss important social interactions :-). Also these apps didn't make the move to mobile, unfortunately.

the_gipsy 4y ago

You might want to check out matrix.org. It's its own protocol, so there is no "universal client" like pidgin. However you can easily host a homeserver and "bridge" a lot of protocols. Personally I only have tried telegram, and it works quite well for what it is. Since all the modern chat apps are not open protocols, the bridges usually work over some kind of limited bot APIs.