Pidgin is back, so let's talk about why a local chat client matters In the 2020s you might be forgiven for having forgotten that such a thing as a native chat client exists, but a handful still do and they're still useful. One of these is Pidgin, the artist formerly known as GAIM. It is still around and still works with a surprising number of protocols – and after the current, second alpha …
After mirc, and a pause, I use Seamonkey-IRC (aka ChatZilla) when needed, which works well. Thx for bringing Pidgin back on my radar again.
And yes, I used linux and DOS IRC clients as well back in the day, and fell back to mirc for lazyness - and because it works with Win3.1/95/98/2000 pretty much the same, including copy the config and done. Same reason why I am still on netscape mail, then mozilla, now seamonkey for > 10 years...
Kinda. Whatsapp requires you to connect with the phone number at least once per week, if I'm not mistaken. If the phone goes offline too long, all linked devices stop sending/receiving messages.
I tried pidgin with whatsapp back in 2023, the experience was terrible. Whenever there was a new message in a group, it'd automatically spawn a new tab. It couldn't read saved contact names, it always showed people as the phone number, which is their whatsapp UID. You also never knew if the image that someone sent was a photo or a sticker, you have to manually download and open every one of them.
"Whatsapp requires you to connect with the phone number at least once per week, if I'm not mistaken. If the phone goes offline too long, all linked devices stop sending/receiving messages."
Haven't noticed yet and the phone where WA is, is normally off for weeks as I forget to check the messages (and phone is off). Can't guarantee there isn't a time it does that, but if there is, it's longer than a week.
> The proprietary IM services will simply change the protocol to block third-party clients again.
Nah. Those silly games were 1990s stuff.
When Mac OS X gained a chat client, iChat, in MacOS X 10.2 in 2002, it used AIM's protocol under the covers.
So what? What it means is that by the dawn of the 21st century these silly games of checksumming the binary and refusing admittance to 3rd party clients was over. The companies were actively encouraging 3rd party clients and sanctioning them as official.
The problems you describe were, mainly, an artefact of 20th century short-sighted protectionism, and they all went away 20+ years ago.
It _was_ real but it was a long long time ago.
> Isn't using a third-party client against most of their TOS?
Nah. Telegram publishes APIs and libraries for access. IRC including IRCv3, Matrix, XMPP, etc. are documented open standards. Skype was reverse engineered years ago and anyway shuts down next month.
I must confess: I never successfully got Pidgin to access Whatsapp.
Signal is a closed black box, contrary to what the cryptonerds claim. It's a PITA.
Most of the business tools are quite easy. Rocket.chat works well, Slack is easy, but TBH I never used Mattermost.
> refusing admittance to 3rd party clients was over
Aren't you a bit too optimistic here?
There's no 3rd party app for the most wide spread messenger in Europe. That is why? Programmers too lazy to talk with WhatsApp? Really?
Or ask Beeper how their iMessage interface is going.
Monopolies do what monopolies can do.
> There's no 3rd party app for the most wide spread messenger in Europe.
Like I said:
Franz, Ferdi, and now Ferdium all talk to Whatsapp and are for me the default way to use the app. So do Station, RamBox, Beeper, and others that I happen not to use.
There _is_ a libpurple connection but I did not get it working -- but I didn't give it very long.
It _is_ possible and it has been done.
Secondly, I have spoken with Beeper about this and the company tells me it has a working gateway.
3-4 years ago it already offered it via a hilarious hack: drawers full of old iPhone 4 hardware.
https://hothardware.com/news/beeper-app-imessage-android-routing-trickery
>” Franz, Ferdi, and now Ferdium all talk to Whatsapp”
But not Pidgin, given this connection isn’t mentioned in the article.
>” It _is_ possible and it has been done.”
Needs to become normal, probably needs the EU to mandate something requiring published and unrestricted APIs and third-party client access to services. Trouble is these will massively impact the advertising revenues currently being used to maintain the “free” to end user service.
It's not just 3rd party T&Cs. Your local IT support can scupper it as well. At IBM, no sane person would want to use Sametime chat, especially Linux users. Piudgin had a sametime plugin that worked really well. Except the IBM Sametime infrastructure was very fragile, users with non-Sametime clients were blamed, scapegoated, and blacklisted. Not that it did any good - pushing users off Pidgin to force them to use the Sametime client just further overloaded the network. Not that they ever admitted it.
I keep seeing Elon as Eloi, except he thinks the Twitter\X users
"are anatomically smaller than modern humans (standing roughly four feet tall), with shoulder-length curly hair, pointed chins, large eyes, small ears, small mouths with bright red thin lips, and sub-human intelligence ("on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children")."
What a load of Morlocks!
>but Finch is a text-mode client for Linux shell warriors
I've checked the sources of the kernel, Linux and I found no shell implementation - all I found was a command line that you can pass options to (i.e. via the GNU GRUB OS) and a barebones terminal emulator (that doesn't do anything unless you provide a shell).
Seeing that Finch uses GNU ncurses, it's rather a ncurses-mode client for GNU bash warriors, but it seems that's much too free to write.
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