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by zetalyrae4 hours ago |
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upvoteby gardnr3 hours ago|
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There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.

Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.

https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/

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upvoteby zetalyrae3 hours ago|
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I remember! I also used Pidgin OTR over the Facebook XMPP gateway. At some point Facebook started recognizing it, but not banning it: you could go to the web interface and you'd see "encrypted message" instead of noise.
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upvoteby alex11383 hours ago|
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Yeah but Facebook's 6 digit pin that they FORCED everyone on and severely disrupted messages and message history is totally a better system

Zuck deserves to be in prison along with other black hat hackers, this is just one of so many other things he's guilty of

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upvoteby LollipopYakuza2 hours ago|
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I don't understand your point. Do you mean he should go to prison for doing whatever he wants with his own product?
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upvoteby alex11382 hours ago|
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Mark Zuckerberg hacked Crimson reporters (a Harvard newspaper) who were investigating him for Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg's company took people's API-facing emails that were in their profiles and replaced them with a facebook.com address. Mark Zuckerberg's company deleted years of his own correspondence. This in addition to things like Onavo

Yeah, I'm suggesting he go to prison for "doing whatever he wants"

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upvoteby CursedSilicon2 hours ago|
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Do you have citations for these claims?

To be clear. They're a weird goal post move from "FORCED a 6 digit pin"

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upvoteby luke54413 hours ago|
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Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.

Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.

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upvoteby dawnerd4 hours ago|
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Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.
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upvoteby twolegs3 hours ago|
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And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
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upvoteby MiddleEndian3 hours ago|
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It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

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upvoteby anthk2 hours ago|
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I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.
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upvoteby MiddleEndian47 minutes ago|
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That sounds about right. I've never used Kopete myself but the KDE team always puts out good work for OSS UIs
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upvoteby jpalepu3 hours ago|
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Great nostalgic reminder! Multi-protocol clients like Adium and Pidgin offered unified messaging and features like persistent logs and customizable interfaces that modern apps often lack.
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upvoteby 3eb7988a16631 hours ago|
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Probably required <50MB of RAM as well.
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upvoteby techpression2 hours ago|
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Back when apps dared to have fun icons. I still smile when I open Cyberduck because of the hilarious icon (which is extremely well designed).
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upvoteby anthk2 hours ago|
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Same code in the background. Kopete for KDE could use Adium chat themes and emoticons.
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upvoteby SoftTalker4 hours ago|
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> you could keep your chat logs forever

Or delete them!

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upvoteby shantara3 hours ago|
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I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
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upvoteby Gualdrapo3 hours ago|
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I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.

"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".

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upvoteby someotherperson4 hours ago|
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You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).

[0] https://www.beeper.com/

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upvoteby varun_ch3 hours ago|
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I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).

I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.

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upvoteby footy2 hours ago|
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I use Beeper now, but Pidgin was really top tier software. It was my favourite piece of software for a long time.
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upvoteby shimman3 hours ago|
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Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.
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upvoteby ale422 hours ago|
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Sure, but unfortunately most people are now using iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook messenger, and so on, and Pidgin can't connect to any of them AFAIK.
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upvoteby RadiozRadioz3 hours ago|
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It's still there! Gary and the team are hard at work on Pidgin 3
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upvoteby hacker_homie3 hours ago|
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I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.

I miss it.

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upvoteby xnx1 hours ago|
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It's a miracle that we still have universally compatible email.
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upvoteby blell2 hours ago|
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GTK+ is only a native GUI toolkit in GNOME.
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upvoteby anthk2 hours ago|
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From the same people, get Bitlbee with libpurple. IRC logging with your favourite client against everything supported by Bitlbee AND the Pidgin library.

You can connect from any OS with an IRC client. It's astounding and liberating.

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