Pidgin 3.0.0 Experimental 1 Announcement

Am I reading this right? Is the only protocol being supported now the most recent version of IRC? Are there plans for others? Part of Pidgin's "calling card" has been its ability to support many different chat protocols. However, that's become difficult since most protocols have become walled gardens and harder to reverse engineer. I'd imagine supporting Matrix, XMPP, Signal, other protocols with open specifications, etc. would be a good idea

yes all the other protocols will eventually be supported. we're a small team of open source developers and these things take time..

The last time I followed Pidgin development was a while ago, but I'm actively using it for various protocols (slack, discord, googlechat, skype), so I'm curious about the decision to break the API.

I understand that the Pidgin community is small, so claiming that "the other protocols will eventually be supported" seems unrealistic. This change requires the community to take on unnecessary porting work and we are already dealing with constant protocol changes, playing whack-a-mole with protocol providers.

For instance, this guy [1] is doing incredible work, but I doubt he will want to invest his time in unnecessary rewrites unless someone steps in to assist with each plugin.

[1] https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord.git