Pidgin 3.0.0 Experimental 1 Announcement

I had no idea people were still working on this. I remember it as Gaim in the 1990s and one of the developers being particularly nasty to me in 2000 after I submitted a patch. I worked hard on that and he was a complete asshole.

Since then I've used that experience to exemplify who I never want to become and how I never want to treat people.

So thanks. Bad experiences can help you become a better person.

PS: shoutout to Daniel Reed (rpidan) who did an Ncurses naim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naim_(software) // https://github.com/jwise/naim) from back then. He was a genuine upstanding guy. Naim in long running screen sessions that I'd log into from text terminals at the library to chat with friends over AIM - good times.

Also, meebo... Basically libpurple over 2005 era AJAX. I even made a super minimal HTTP forms based client I could use over flip phones in the early 2000s. It was optimized for T9N and per/KB metered data plans. Never really publicized it. Probably still have the code somewhere.

Well fwiw, all of those people are no longer involved in the project.

Yes, there was some drama in the early 2000s where a bunch of bad vibe people got forcefully shaken out.

I did some digging and have been able to find basically everything. I'm keeping it to myself. No dirty laundry here.

Also if pidgin could magically combine slack, messenger, telegram, discord, and Whatsapp in a single reasonable app ... It'd be a return to the glory days. The current state of half a dozen web apps is such a pain. Just text chat. Nothing fancy.

What a dream...

In the meantime, you can try Beeper which does that through Matrix. It connects all the apps you mentioned in a single app.

Amazing. Will try it tomorrow

Blast from the past; I was maintainer for a couple of releases of funpidgin; a fork started over an argument about if there should be an option to make the message input resizable https://supine.com/posts/2008/04/forking-for-funpidgin-and-p... https://m.slashdot.org/story/100702

My pride and joy was the Adium theme support (which was resurrected from another rejected patch) https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...

Beeper seems to be working ok for me for the moment

AJAX... that takes me back! I remember when it started becoming trendy, you did not have to reload the page for updates! It was magical.

Or self hosted matrix with bridges, which is basically what's underneath beeper.

I use this ansible role to deploy it: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

Fwiw, meebo was based on libpurple. They employed Mark Doliner, aka Kingant, who was also a Pidgin developer and eventual lead developer.

there's basic text support for most of those in pidgin 2 right now https://pidgin.im/plugins/

Meebo was a lifesaver in college where I could log in via school computers and talk to my friends before my parents got me a cellphone lol.

It was a long long time again.

Good memories.

pidgin and adium were my dream apps for a long time.

Had not heard of this. Got it set up relatively smoothly. Great stuff, thanks!