lobsters score: 4 · tags: release
This is awesome. I’d like to see some innovative methods at turning proprietary chat apps into isolated backend interfaces, developing them as standalone API’s… and integrating them seamlessly into pidgin like the old days back when XMPP was the dominant open standard. . . . this would be a forced hijacking of closed-source platforms, either that, or reverse engineer the closed-source clients, and implement a standard open API, so forcefully rebuilding them with XMPP support, that’d be ideal
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We have always reverse engineered the proprietary protocols, we’re just not putting them in our main repo any more. We haven’t figured out if they’ll be in our releases directly, but we’re keeping them separate for a number of reasons.
You might also be interested in https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/purple-3-pidgin-3-gaim-3-plugins/395
Also you might want to look at https://spectrum.im/ and https://slidge.im/.
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the number of useful protocols supported by pidgin seem to be dropping IMO
I loved this app back in the way when I could do XMPP, IRC and AIM. The fragmentation of chat is tough these days. I now need hangouts, discord, signal and slack, of which pidgin supports none.
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In the last coupe of years I revisited pidgin (2) because I was using a low RAM machine (8G). I was pleasantly surprised I could get it to manage discord, WhatsApp and signal which saved me running any electron apps. I also massively preferred the experience mediated by pidgin
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Pidgin 2 has support for all of these via third party plugins… https://pidgin.im/plugins
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I’m sure @grim would love some help there once API gets stabilized for the protocol plugins (if not already).
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There’s already been a bit of work by others and myself on this front. https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/purple-3-pidgin-3-gaim-3-plugins/395
We’re very intentionally keeping reverse engineered protocols out of the main code base in pidgin3. Some will end up in releases, but we’re trying to find ways to make them easier to find and install.
For example, with flatpak on linux there’s extension points that third party plugin authors can use to publish their plugins as a separate flatpak that will then get updated with everything else automatically and the pidgin flatpak will see and use them.
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i’m not sure it’s that easy, every chat app is closed source for a reason. It will devolved into cat and mouse games with bad UX
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AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, etc were all closed source too and were much harder to reverse engineer than JSON over HTTPS…
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