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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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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Pidgin 2 has support for all of these via third party plugins… https://pidgin.im/plugins

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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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