Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client

1

Adium

I really miss Adium (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). 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.

#Communication #Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging 7 social mentions

2

Pidgin

#Communication #Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging 16 social mentions

3

Gajim

#Communication #Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging 12 social mentions

4

Off-the-Record Messaging

A: Google & Facebook shut down their XMPP gateways to force you into their apps. All the sudden you 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/.

#Communication #Group Chat & Notifications #Instant Messaging 10 social mentions

5

Franz

> 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/.

#Group Chat & Notifications #Messaging #Communication 28 social mentions