5 ms·

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 prio

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
  And there's still not a single decent Matrix client for macOS. Best case you get some ugly-ass QT thing that doesn't work anything like a macOS app would. The official and most featureful Matrix client is even worse than that, it's an electron app, ugh. The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text in a single message is just... How did everyone involved decide that it's reasonable? Did people design the UX on top of a protocol when it should always be done the other way around?
  - ptman 4y ago
    There is a spec change proposal for fixing this: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2530 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/253...
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    It's ironic that out of the non-iMessage chat clients, Facebook Messenger, despite being web-based, is the closest we have to the Apple UI.
    - grishka 4y ago
      Which specific Facebook messenger UI are you talking about? There are two just on the web alone. The main issue I'm having with every single of the modern IM apps is that they combine the chat list and the chat switcher into a single control. It's part of the overall unfortunate trend of touchscreen-ification of desktop UIs. Tabbed chat windows need to make a comeback, yesterday.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        Facebook Messenger on the web looks (or looked? My last encounter with it was in 2017) the closest to a native iOS/macOS client even to this day: https://i1.wp.com/ensegundos.do/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/messenger-web.jpg https://i1.wp.com/ensegundos.do/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/m...
- xorcist 4y ago
  In practice it's mostly whatever Jabber had, which is mostly whatever libpurple has. We're not really moving forward with the proprietary chat protocols (Slack, Teams, Whatsapp). It is a much, much harder problem to solve than MSN and Yahoo ever was.
rw_grim 4y ago
You may be interested to know that Pidgin 3 is targeting macOS natively. We don't have a release date yet, but we are inching closer and closer to an alpha which I've written a blog post about what we're targeting with it. Yes this is on patreon but it's public https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546 https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546
- zamadatix 4y ago
  Thank you for all of the work on Pidgin over the years.
  - rw_grim 4y ago
    You're very welcome, thanks for using it!
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  What the what?! You’re damn right I’m interested to know.
  - rw_grim 4y ago
    You might also be interested in my State of the Bird presentations as well that happen quarterly. https://pidgin.im/posts/2023-01-state-of-the-bird-2022-q4/ https://pidgin.im/posts/2023-01-state-of-the-bird-2022-q4/
filmgirlcw 4y ago
When Apple dropped iChat it hurt too. I agree with you that Google was the mail in the coffin but the fact that there was no way for me to go from my .Mac iChat account to iMessage seamlessly (I could use the same ID but had to add everyone as contacts again). Slack was definitely a major blow. I used Campfire at work but we still had to use other services, usually gChat, to message privately. When we migrated to Slack in 2014 or whatever, we now had a service that allowed private messaging AND had mobile apps too — something that the old era of the Adium/Pidgin/Trillian’s never quite executed on (I know there were mobile AIM and gChat clients back in the day; I had AIM on my SideKick in high school and a number of decentish apps on iOS even, but those protocols just weren’t ever designed or well-adapted/executed to push messaging a la BBM or iMessage or SMS the way it needed to be — largely thanks to the wireless carriers who wanted to keep a hold of that pure profit SMS for as long as possible.) We had mobile-first/mobile-only services like WhatsApp (which immediately took off outside the US) and the GroupMe’s had some success too, but those services were slow to support (if they ever did) XMPP or other bridges to get them working on desktop), so Slack was a nice unifier. I loved Adium for so long. I even had a Slack bridge I think in it at some point. But I had to finally let it go and remove it from my dock. I pay for Beeper today, but I don’t use it as much as I would like. But it remains one of the better ways for me to recreate the world I had 10 and 15 years ago.

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
And there's still not a single decent Matrix client for macOS. Best case you get some ugly-ass QT thing that doesn't work anything like a macOS app would. The official and most featureful Matrix client is even worse than that, it's an electron app, ugh. The Matrix protocol itself sometimes also leaves much to be desired. It's much more modern than XMPP, that's true, but the fact that you can't send an image with text in a single message is just... How did everyone involved decide that it's reasonable? Did people design the UX on top of a protocol when it should always be done the other way around?
- ptman 4y ago
  There is a spec change proposal for fixing this: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/2530 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/253...
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  It's ironic that out of the non-iMessage chat clients, Facebook Messenger, despite being web-based, is the closest we have to the Apple UI.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Which specific Facebook messenger UI are you talking about? There are two just on the web alone. The main issue I'm having with every single of the modern IM apps is that they combine the chat list and the chat switcher into a single control. It's part of the overall unfortunate trend of touchscreen-ification of desktop UIs. Tabbed chat windows need to make a comeback, yesterday.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Facebook Messenger on the web looks (or looked? My last encounter with it was in 2017) the closest to a native iOS/macOS client even to this day: https://i1.wp.com/ensegundos.do/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/messenger-web.jpg https://i1.wp.com/ensegundos.do/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/m...
xorcist 4y ago
In practice it's mostly whatever Jabber had, which is mostly whatever libpurple has. We're not really moving forward with the proprietary chat protocols (Slack, Teams, Whatsapp). It is a much, much harder problem to solve than MSN and Yahoo ever was.

rw_grim 4y ago

You may be interested to know that Pidgin 3 is targeting macOS natively. We don't have a release date yet, but we are inching closer and closer to an alpha which I've written a blog post about what we're targeting with it. Yes this is on patreon but it's public https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546 https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-were-with-3-78291546

zamadatix 4y ago
Thank you for all of the work on Pidgin over the years.
- rw_grim 4y ago
  You're very welcome, thanks for using it!
eyelidlessness 4y ago
What the what?! You’re damn right I’m interested to know.
- rw_grim 4y ago
  You might also be interested in my State of the Bird presentations as well that happen quarterly. https://pidgin.im/posts/2023-01-state-of-the-bird-2022-q4/ https://pidgin.im/posts/2023-01-state-of-the-bird-2022-q4/

filmgirlcw 4y ago

When Apple dropped iChat it hurt too. I agree with you that Google was the mail in the coffin but the fact that there was no way for me to go from my .Mac iChat account to iMessage seamlessly (I could use the same ID but had to add everyone as contacts again). Slack was definitely a major blow. I used Campfire at work but we still had to use other services, usually gChat, to message privately. When we migrated to Slack in 2014 or whatever, we now had a service that allowed private messaging AND had mobile apps too — something that the old era of the Adium/Pidgin/Trillian’s never quite executed on (I know there were mobile AIM and gChat clients back in the day; I had AIM on my SideKick in high school and a number of decentish apps on iOS even, but those protocols just weren’t ever designed or well-adapted/executed to push messaging a la BBM or iMessage or SMS the way it needed to be — largely thanks to the wireless carriers who wanted to keep a hold of that pure profit SMS for as long as possible.) We had mobile-first/mobile-only services like WhatsApp (which immediately took off outside the US) and the GroupMe’s had some success too, but those services were slow to support (if they ever did) XMPP or other bridges to get them working on desktop), so Slack was a nice unifier. I loved Adium for so long. I even had a Slack bridge I think in it at some point. But I had to finally let it go and remove it from my dock. I pay for Beeper today, but I don’t use it as much as I would like. But it remains one of the better ways for me to recreate the world I had 10 and 15 years ago.