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Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

Feels like we've come full circle back to the early 2000's were apps like Trillian let you chat on MSN Messenger, AIM, IRC, ICQ and others.

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It looks that Miranda IM (initial release in February 2000) is still actively developed - https://www.miranda-ng.org/.

Same for Pidgin

https://pidgin.im/

I used Pidgin for years, but while it may be actively developed it has been stagnant. It's ugly and very difficult to customize to make it less so, and Unicode has always been broken (at least on Windows). Compared to mobile or even web versions of Messenger and Hangouts Pidgin is terrible, which is why I eventually gave up on it.

They should probably remove "AIM" from their front page, considering it no longer exists.

Trillian and Adium were such killer apps at their time.

And yet not; those were native apps which reverse re-engineers or reimplemented the protocol.

My understanding is that Franz and such are just wrappers around the same websites/webapps that run the underlying service

I used Trillian for a while, but then at some point moved to Meebo. I forgot who they were acquired by, but it was a sad day when they shuttered.

I do miss the days of early Trillian.

Don't forget about Digsby, which I believe was OS Native and written in Python.

Anybody remember Fire for OS X? I used that until iChat came around.

Yes! I think Adium won that war.

Adium was awesome! I miss the days of good native apps.

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