Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.
I and most of my friends do.
They are also responsible for my favorite bug report ever: https://bugs.gentoo.org/35890
So yeah, ditched it
IRC
ICQ
MSN
Yahoo messenger for some people in japan
Whatsapp, but noboday was there haha
Whastapp, some people there
FB Messenger
iMessage, but bugs with normals SMS, so disabled it
Google talk.. used by some, but I like to de-google a bit.
Back to whatsapp
kakaotalk, line, and wechat for research / gaming
Telegram. don't like it at all
Signal. kind of buggy
So in the end, I'm using whatsapp ads it's still ubiquitous here, and it's one of the most secure platforms.
Jabber a bit,
AOL Messenger,
Blackberry messenger,
Bloomberg Messenger (bank paid 2k per month for it!),
Skype for messaging,
Keybase (kind of cool but too heavy),
Slack,
and now Element Matrix.
Its one place sometimes I think regulation might be good to force standardization (like electricity or phone standards).
Oh and when I go to asia I use the ones there - viber, line, wechat etc.
IRC
ICQ
AIM
Trillian
Skype
Slack (just co-workers)
Discord (just co-workers that are friends now)
Must be like over a 30 year period of time.
Nice https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/24953235/nice.jpg
It's amazing how much spinning happens in current media. The only people in the world who truly know how much this is are those who get the headlines before the stories are written and talked about, like day traders, who get it for speed reasons. It's cool, but it sucks it costs so much to get an unfiltered news source.
and then marked as duplicate.
seems like a lot of arguing went on on this bug tracker, very amusing to read
[0] Not that Google Chat, the other one.
There was no product named Google Chat until recently.
I thought it was Google Chat.
Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)
(On topic: I use it with pidgin still though for the one-on-one chats with a few people!)
I'm fairly certain that I'm using Pidgin's XMPP functionality to communicate with others that are receiving their end in Google Hangouts.
Fun fact: if you were on a non-Google server talking to someone on Google Talk and they clicked the button to "upgrade" to Hangouts, on your end they would show up as perpetually "away" and any messages you sent them would be blackholed. Yes, that was as frustrating as it sounds.
- Google used to support XMPP federation, and they pulled the plug on that years ago.
- Any new features introduced as part of Hangouts haven't been backported to XMPP, and so there may be random breakage when XMPP users talk to Hangouts users.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
Spoke to friend this week, she told me she doesn't have a computer. That's increasingly common. People get by with their phones.
A lot of this has to do with the ecosystem and how a device is presented and what the UX is like. Manufacturers increasingly want to lock things down and hide them away.
I agree that this trend should be fought.
The same could be said about 90% of laptops and desktops purchased for home use. How many people actually use "computers" for tasks they couldn't do on a phone or tablet if those devices had larger screens and keyboard support.
The true dumbification of computers started with smartphones. iOS and Android are the primary drivers of this change, of treating computers as appliances. Microsoft unfortunately embraced this trend in recent years, they quite openly say Windows is an OS-as-a-Service now[0]. Still leaves plenty of control points to exploit[1], but it starts getting in the way.
--
[0] - https://mastodon.technology/@temporal/105385475519240956 - I almost spit my tea on my keyboard when I saw this popping up the other day.
[1] - That's why I'm using a Windows 2-in-1 instead of an Android tablet.
I remarked that UI/UX is so simple nowadays that kids aren't gonna have the wherewithal to do their own troubleshooting for bigger issues and how irreparable a lot of devices are now the insides of computers are gonna be completely foreign to them.
Gonna bookmark this now.
Yeah kids can't use computers, because they don't come with knowledge pre-installed, but the ones who are interested will figure it out. It's not like there's a shortage of resources. And if you're concerned about your own kids, then teach them and they'll have a nice advantage in school.
when steam engines were replaced with the otto motor and cars became available to the general population, people were able to repair and understand the engines themselves. they had an understanding of mechanical principles. a few generations later, and only car nerds understand cars.
everyone else has to go to a mechanic to understand why their car's engine won't start or why it sounds so strange. and those weird mechanics will fix the car for them.
nowadays people are mechanically illiterate.
/s
my point is, when a technology becomes convenient enough so we don't have to think about it while it fulfills it's purpose, then you don't have to understand it to use it.
this creates the need for specialists. is that a bad thing? i say no. who defines what should be basic knowledge and what not? we don't all need to be a mechanic, a chemist, a doctor and an ITC pro.
Is a tragically limited view of what computers are.
Programmable computers are fundamentally different from steam engines. A steam engine will never be anything except a steam engine. Most of the manufactured objects we encounter in everyday life are similar: single- (or occasionally multi-) purpose goods that do what they were designed to do.
A general-purpose computer is not like this. It can be made to serve virtually infinite purposes. It can be made to do things the manufacturers never imagined anyone doing, and things the manufacturers wished it couldn't do.[0] Almost nothing else has that kind of raw potential for human expression. Perhaps a blank notepad and pen might be analogous.
I guess you could say a computer computes, but that's using an overly broad term to deliberately elide the point.
The things is that you don't need to be an IT person to use applications, as it used to be. So fewer people learn IT skills just so they can play a game or layout a document.
I know very little about cars but drive one daily. I can see how other people don't bother learning about computers just so they can write up a report for their job or order stuff on Amazon.
I like your poetic description of general-purpose computers. But I'm wondering why you think less of general-purpose machinery.
In another sense, computers are closer to pencils and paper - they're the tools you use to design the rest of the tools. And that's something special.
A general purpose computer, on the other hand, includes a power supply, and generally doesnt need tools that change matter to retarget it for another application; the tools needed to do so are made of information, and are thus readily available.
Granted: we as CS folks and business folks are choking off our own sources of talent by hiding the tools and keys needed to truly examine our systems, all in the name of "user-friendlines", but its still possible to use what is exposed to learn computing basics like how wifi works, or what a proxy server are.
To be frank, I think this distinction is precisely why I get frustrated at computing incompetence: a PC at home isn't locked down and has access to these tools. Anyone can learn -- even using a web browser and notepad to write JS.
In contrast, learning how an engine works requires mass-based tools that are big and expensive and require careful knowledge of how to not harm yourself when disassembling or working on the engine.
This distinction is massive, and yet we still use analogies to cars. Shops with tools are not plentiful and readily accessible to average people, the engines can't be examined from the inside out, coils and springs are dangerous physically. I can't just go looking to take a class, either: not all schools have shops!
As recently as the early 2000s, ordinary users were comfortable searching out and installing new software. I remember Napster becoming absolutely massive, and it wasn't because the IT folks installed it for users.
People who don't know how to use computers treat them like a magic box that may or may not do what they want to, if they use the right magical incantation.
Computers inexplicably don't do what you want them to do all the time, though. Modern cars, by contrast, are incredibly reliable even with extremely insufficient maintenance.
Car analogies applied to computing tend not to be very good, at least partially for that reason.
Are these parts not part of the car?
And then there is the stuff that is often different car to car, like where lights are, how to adjust certain settings. Want to pair the Bluetooth in your Mercedes to your phone? I consider myself extremely proficient at computers and absolutely know how to use one in almost any capacity and even I’ve struggled with its lunacy (which is much more a reflection on Mercedes bad in-car systems that vary model year to model year and can differ based on what options your dealer ordered).
The author makes his point pretty clear here:
> Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you're twenty-five or over. It's something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true.
He then offers some suggestions for how to help kids become more technically proficient with computers because he thinks it's a useful skill to have.
A common refrain is "I'm hopeless with math/numbers".
And to be frank, calculators exist, so as long as you know how to get to the answer you need... I don't think I have a problem with it.
A computer is something you can use to consume content or produce content.
A tablet is something you can only really use to consume content. (Regular tablet, not artist tablet obviously, and those generally have to talk to a computer)
We don't need to, true, but we can... and it can be fun too... why choose less, turning into mindless content consumers?
But the number of things you can do with a computer expands enormously when you know just a little bit of bash scripting, or python, or even Excel!
I set up a dedicated youtube-dl box in our office to get around the exact visitors-with-PowerPoint-and-YouTube-videos thing he mentions
I can certainly understand that one would do so on the go, but it seems extremely cumbersome to do a school assignment on a phone keyboard.
I think the average person that doesn't need to do heavy editing, coding, etc. can get by with an iPad Pro w/ some accessories.
Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days.
How about making _general_ computing devices more accessible via UI/UX to the _general_ public? That doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
It doesn't matter how much you improve it's ui/ux... if it's not a desirable feature to the general population, few will ever use it.
This seems to be getting worse, for example Google and its financial institution partners have decided that general-purpose computing and payments aren't safe together. Google Pay suddenly started refusing to do contactless payments on my rooted phone.
While I agree with the sentiment, and some of the complexity is not essential, the adage still applies: "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". At some point, "general computing" means there's some irreductible complexity that cannot be made simpler without the device ceasing to be general purpose.
That's pretty much what the iPad is. A general purpose computing device but easier to use and with tighter security than a PC. At some point you end up sacrificing versatility for accessibility to the masses.
This article explains it well: https://hisham.hm/2020/12/10/smart-tech-%e2%80%94-smart-for-...
With that attitude, eventually the impact of economies of scale will end up denying us the ability to afford those devices or to use them how we see fit.
The problem GP refers to is this: making computers is expensive, gets cheaper with economies of scale. But economies of scale are capital-intensive, so they exist only where there's a market for it. The market for people requiring general-purpose computation is small and getting smaller, while the market for constrained computing is only ever bigger. Which means at some point the capital-wielding companies will just leave the market, and the prices of new general-purpose computers will go way, way up.
On top of that, computers today gain most of their value interacting with other computers. Once the mainstream usage - like your e-mail or your bank - gets neatly packaged in sandboxed, trust-computing-enabled environments, the utility of your general-purpose platform will plummet. A dark but entirely possible scenario is that it eventually becomes illegal to use general-purpose computers to connect to such services, because "security".
I could picture a CPU design that had a boot key or other restricted features set by blowing fuses (or similar tricks) during packaging. The "developer" unit leaves them unblown.
If they're selling 10M "regular" units per year, and 5000 "developer" models over the product lifetime, you have to amortize the cost of special-casing the production line for a short run, and stocking and supporting a second SKU, over a relatively small sales volume. It could well be more expensive than the few cents of electricity per unit to blow the fuses in a standard unit.
Edit: Nope. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix/issues/18
I purely use it as a chat client and avoid most of the more complicated features, since I don't use them.
I certainly have no wish to have five different clients open, many of which not even scriptable when I can have all my contacts in one list.
ICQ is alive and well, and has native clients for most modern OSes.
It got bought out and spun off when AOL were shutting down.
Not sure I expect much more out of somebody that codes for AOL software.
you could literally be critiquing any of 10 onion-layers of dialog allegedly about an extinct PM client, but it turned into a "no one uses computers anymore, just phones" tale.
I cannot tell if you are pro-AIM or a paid Slack user
It's not that deep. Someone unironically saying "Does not everyone still use [Pidgin]" is legitimately out of touch with consumers today.
15 years ago I had ONE messaging app that logged me into MSN, ICQ, QQ, Zephyr, Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, and Renren.
On that one messaging app I had either written or downloaded plugins for:
* End-to-end encryption (receiver needed the plugin as well)
* Automatic two-way human language translation via online translation APIs so I could have a conversation with someone who didn't share a common language with me
* Automatic two-way conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese. (I can read both, but traditional is faster for me, so I had it auto-translate all simplified to traditional for me, as well as auto-translate all of my outgoing traditional to simplified on a per-user basis for the receiver's convenience.)
* Ability to create conversation groups across networks, with my account serving as a gateway.
* Automatic rendering of in-line LaTeX math equations.
* Controlling of IOT devices, and allowing access to my dorm room for guests by having them send me an instant message with a certain secret word.
* Cloud-based logs of all of my messages.
* Online gateway that allowed me to access all my message logs from anywhere on any device and any OS with a web browser.
I feel like we've gone backwards. I now have a dozen different closed-protocol, walled-garden messaging apps, some of them even actively try to PUNISH you for trying to decompile and edit them, translation is not automatic, cloud logs only exist on Facebook messenger, E2E encryption is skeptically touted and paraded as some new thing even though I personally had real open-source E2E encryption 15 years ago on ALL my messengers, and everyone is siloed into their own apps and there is no way to send messages across networks.
Sigh. Tech in 2021 sucks. I honestly felt my messaging was way more advanced 15 years ago.
I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through.
They never provided third party APIs. The work of developing a unified messaging client was in getting around the ways in which they tried to stop you from interfacing with their system, and responding quickly when their countermeasures updated.
We haven't seen a change in the behavior of chat providers; we've seen developers give up on trying.
It's not entirely different than the current situation, in that regard, but there was also less security baked in on the older services, and much of the protocols were in plain text.
It's funny. I was just reminiscing about all this a few days ago on Twitter. https://twitter.com/chipx86/status/1352371276464050181
While I'm out of the IM game (gaim?) these days, I'd be very interested in any modern attempts to reverse-engineer these modern services, and whether the pushback from companies would be any different.
Ripcord (https://cancel.fm/ripcord/) doesn't seem to be giving any indications that it no longer works, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (and probably for fairly large values of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ too)
My computer is generally only able to handle one Chromium-based HI I EAT ALL YOUR RAM AND GPU, so I basically treat Discord like email as a result of the no-3rd-party-app policy. Given that the Discord "app" is just Electron, it'll get in a fight with the poor thermal design of my laptop in exactly the same way on the website does.
This being said, it's very difficult for me to argue loudly against the position they're, because it's complicated.
Discord has scaled to the point where "13 year old skiddies who like pulling legs off spiders will use any alternate clients they find [which don't include anti-spam protection] to send a {server,reputation}-destroying level of spam" is having a more measurable impact than "we need to maintain equality of access". I suspect that extremely strong management vision+competence would be necessary to prioritize this - as things stand right now, it's incredibly easy to deprioritize because the vast majority of people using Discord either have minimally-viably decent machines appropriate for playing games or completing actual day jobs.
Obv these kinds of things with unsupported potentially hostile APIs put high requirements of diligent maintenance.
IRC kept dropping connection and requiring new nickserv sign-in.
I thought libpurple/pidgin were mostly abandoned and that this would not be likely to improve , but it’s great to see that there’s hope and I might have been dismissing it prematurely.
On-topic, Pidgin remains great, I still install it on every new desktop, but I haven't fired it up in years. I suppose it's been displaced by Slack, more's the pity.
When developers talked about protocols rather than products.
15 years ago I had ONE messaging app that logged me into MSN, ICQ, QQ, Zephyr, Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, Facebook, and Renren.
On that one messaging app I had either written or downloaded plugins for:
* End-to-end encryption (receiver needed the plugin as well)
* Automatic two-way human language translation via online translation APIs so I could have a conversation with someone who didn't share a common language with me
* Automatic two-way conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese. (I can read both, but traditional is faster for me, so I had it auto-translate all simplified to traditional for me, as well as auto-translate all of my outgoing traditional to simplified on a per-user basis for the receiver's convenience.)
* Ability to create conversation groups across networks, with my account serving as a gateway.
* Automatic rendering of in-line LaTeX math equations.
* Controlling of IOT devices, and allowing access to my dorm room for guests by having them send me an instant message with a certain secret word.
* Cloud-based logs of all of my messages.
* Online gateway that allowed me to access all my message logs from anywhere on any device and any OS with a web browser.
I feel like we've gone backwards. I now have a dozen different closed-protocol, walled-garden messaging apps, some of them even actively try to PUNISH you for trying to decompile and edit them, translation is not automatic, cloud logs only exist on Facebook messenger, E2E encryption is skeptically touted and paraded as some new thing even though I personally had real open-source E2E encryption 15 years ago on ALL my messengers, and everyone is siloed into their own apps and there is no way to send messages across networks.
Sigh. Tech in 2021 sucks. I honestly felt my messaging was way more advanced 15 years ago.
Trillian used to be like Pidgin and Adium on Windows but then they went and made its own IM service.
That said, it is annoying how so many chat services have gone out of their way to break the ability of 3rd party clients like Pidgin to work. :-(
Pidgin's psychic mode plugin was great fun, though.
Given all those things with hindsight, it makes perfect sense for browsers to have long lineages and it makes perfect sense why standalone chat services mostly died out.
Sadly I don't do real-time communication anymore and even if I do I don't think any of my pidgin/adium (XMPP) contacts still use them.
But what do I use it for? Nowadays I talk to people on Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack and Telegram and none of them can be used on Pidgin.
Not Pidgin's fault I know. Just companies trying to lock people in.
I used Pidgin until 2011, I guess. There was Pidgin portable, which was very easy to use on computer labs where you don't have install acess.
Then most people switched to BBM. I worked as a BlackBerry dev at that time, so I followed that path.
But new, younger people are coming up every day and not all of them are up on the old hits. AIM is totally dead, and even some of the other protocols you might use pidgin for, like standard xmpp, as I used to do with pidgin and gtalk, are not as relevant as they were before.
Audio never seems to work, fortunatly in the rare occasion someone calls it also rings my phone. Most of my chat for work is on slack or WhatsApp, just some real old school people that use the Skype protocol.
Pidgin and libpurple also have roots in another project called Everybuddy which was one of the first multi-protocol integrated free software chat clients. As I recall, Torrey Searle started Everybuddy because he was having a hard time getting traction on adding multiple protocols to GAIM at the time for a variety of reasons my hazy memory doesn't really remember.
For a couple of years after GAIM started to get plugin and multiple protocol support, much code was shared between GAIM and Everybuddy, and then eventually effort centered around just one of the code bases which eventually became Pidgin and libpurple.
Source: I was involved in GAIM early on and Torrey is a friend from those days.
I need to try this immediately.
It's been a REALLY long time.