[ForHackernews]

Interesting! Anyone here remember Pidgin? It was such a fantastic app for chatting with friends on AIM, MSN, ICQ, gchat (XMPP), and IRC all from one interface. It even had an "off the record" (OTR) plugin that was an early example of end-to-end encryption.

It was a good illustration of how an open source app could surpass all the proprietary alternatives because it wasn't subject to the same incentives as a commercial company. Although obviously all those companies wised up and killed XMPP...

[ChainOfFools]

Remember? Pidgin is still a core piece of infrastructure in our company's managed services platform, and not for lack of interest "upgrading" but because it's just exactly the right tool for the job for certain kinds of internal company messaging, with self-hosted XMPP.

Completely defining your own secure perimeter by self hosting everything possible makes for extremely perfunctory audits by regulatory bodies for the industries (finance, mainly) we support.

[ajsnigrutin]

Is there a good way to get google chat/hangouts/whateveritscallednow into pidgin? It used to support xmpp, but it doesn't anymore :/

[ChainOfFools]

Sorry, can't help there. Although I'm not entirely sure if I understand what you're asking properly, because pigeons certainly does support xmpp, in fact it's the only thing it really supports quite well as far as I'm aware. Its these other services that either don't use XMPP or don't use it (or any open standard protocol) any more.

We only use Pidgin for native XMPP intra-org chat via self-hosted, AD-integrated private servers, a role which it has served remarkably well up to our largest client site of about 300 users or so. For phones, we support Xabber or Conversations but all BYOD usage comes with mandatory wireguard wrapping. We don't have much occasion to experiment with Pidgin's multi-protocol functionality, as our clients typically have little incentive to facilitate and support internet-facing chat capabilities.

[szszrk]

Pidgin was (is) great, but that was possible with jabber transports on any client. I had multiple major closed networks, blogging platform, RSS, IRC and more in one jabber/xmpp client. Cli, phone, second computer... No problem, including self hosted.

Miss those days when companies didn't invest into building walled gardens.

[l72]

I still use pidgin daily for Slack. I've even written a libpurple custom protocol for our own homegrown app.

[shrimp_emoji]

https://www.bbc.com/pidgin

[ForHackernews]

?

I was talking about https://pidgin.im/