Just an update that we missed some bugs that were affecting new users so we've released 2.90.1 which fixes them. The linked posted has been updated with this information as well.

We haven't started tackling ee2e yet, but we'll have extension points to add custom stuff because of xmpp has 3 e2ee methods, gpg, otr, and, omemeo with a new one on the way as well.

This is about complex data and accessing it later for display and search in the application. There is a command line tool we're putting together to make searching from the command line possible though.

While there have been clipboard bugs, we've never used those keystrokes in the UI. However, GTK2 did have a way to let users change the menu shortcuts by hovering over the menu item and hitting a new keystroke and I suspect that's what happened here.

Maybe, as others have noted here, signal doesn't allow third party clients on their networks... That said, neither did AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ...

But we're trying to fix the thing you're always complaining about...?

I cleaned up the language on the irc bit in the post as it was confusing people. But we are very much aiming to support everything including all the big chat networks. That's why so much of our internal API had to change.

This release is to get something out there even with limited functionality rather than not releasing until it's at feature parity with Pidgin 2.x which is going to take a long time on our current trajectory.

I hope so? :-D

Fwiw, meebo was based on libpurple. They employed Mark Doliner, aka Kingant, who was also a Pidgin developer and eventual lead developer.

Well fwiw, all of those people are no longer involved in the project.

Yes, there was some drama in the early 2000s where a bunch of bad vibe people got forcefully shaken out.

I did some digging and have been able to find basically everything. I'm keeping it to myself. No dirty laundry here.

Also if pidgin could magically combine slack, messenger, telegram, discord, and Whatsapp in a single reasonable app ... It'd be a return to the glory days. The current state of half a dozen web apps is such a pain. Just text chat. Nothing fancy.

What a dream...

In the meantime, you can try Beeper which does that through Matrix. It connects all the apps you mentioned in a single app.

Or self hosted matrix with bridges, which is basically what's underneath beeper.

I use this ansible role to deploy it: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

Had not heard of this. Got it set up relatively smoothly. Great stuff, thanks!

Amazing. Will try it tomorrow

there's basic text support for most of those in pidgin 2 right now https://pidgin.im/plugins/

Beeper seems to be working ok for me for the moment

yes all the other protocols will eventually be supported. we're a small team of open source developers and these things take time..

The last time I followed Pidgin development was a while ago, but I'm actively using it for various protocols (slack, discord, googlechat, skype), so I'm curious about the decision to break the API.

I understand that the Pidgin community is small, so claiming that "the other protocols will eventually be supported" seems unrealistic. This change requires the community to take on unnecessary porting work and we are already dealing with constant protocol changes, playing whack-a-mole with protocol providers.

For instance, this guy [1] is doing incredible work, but I doubt he will want to invest his time in unnecessary rewrites unless someone steps in to assist with each plugin.

[1] https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord.git

Presumably because the old API was broken/lacking/etc. Calling the resulting porting work "unnecessary" without even considering why the API might have been changed is not fair.

The pidgin project is 25 years old, and libpurple is 17 years old. It's entirely fair that a rework is required, and much appreciated that this work is continuing.

So to put this very simply, there is no way in pidgin 2 without breaking API to address a message after it's been displayed. Eion has been hacking around this for years via commands in protocols and then replaying messages and stuff. While this works, it's not a great user experience.

So at a bare minimum we needed to totally change the way messages work. Which inside of a chat client, is a pretty big change. That obviously led to other changes and so on and so on.

As for the other protocols... We needed something to prove out most of the abstractions and trying to prove out abstractions while implementing multiple protocols is a ton of work. But on our radar are new XMPP, Bonjour, and even a Matrix plugin. All of these will be coming from us and will be in tree.

That said, there will not be any proprietary protocols in our official source tree. If you want more information on that, check out this post [1].

As for Eion's plugins, I've been talking to him through much of this as you would expect. Obviously his time is precious and we didn't make this changes to spite him or anything, but we (me specifically) have offered to start porting his protocols for him.

[1] https://dev.to/grim/in-tree-protocols-15ne

Thank you for sharing the details!

Not sure if my memory deceives me, but did not Pidgin support XMPP?

I suppose for now I may stick to Gajim (and Conversations on Android).

Pidgin supports lots of protocols, including xmpp, via plugins. It just sounds like they choose to make breaking changes to the plugin API for v3. I'd expect popular protocols to get ported at some point before GA.

Yes this 100%. As the post says, nearly all of the API in libpurple and pidgin has changed. So we have to rewrite all of the protocols yet.

Sure it did. Our company chat was XMPP 10 years ago and pidgin was one of the most widely used clients. I assume it's just the experimental version that doesn't support it yet.

Nowadays we use zulip at work which has a better model (topics). For IRC I use quassel because I can have the backend running on a server and when I connect using the frontend I see the channel history and messages I might have received weeks ago...