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Comment by valbaca | Hacker News Reader

oh pidgin. Throughout my life (as a millennial) chat went this way:

1. IRC

2. IRC, Yahoo messenger, Aol Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger (mostly based on your ISP in the early days)

3. All + Skype (video!! wow!) + Google messenger. *This was when pidgin was invaluable* (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)

4. Skype started charging and since everyone was on Facebook, everyone moved to Facebook messenger. Text messages also became free, so for instant comms you just texted people.

5. Slowly FB Messenger took precedence over even text messages as data plans became better

6. A decade passes...

7. The exodus off of Facebook begins and Discord takes over as a way to talk to your group of friends.

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Stage 2 evokes warm memories. The clients were featureful enough but very far from being resource hogs. The UIs were workable and hid plenty of options in their menus.

The webcam features on MSN messenger landed at the same time as broadband internet became widespread in my country, when I was at school, so everyone was in on the novelty.

Some of it is certainly the cynicism of age and work life, but I'm certain something has been lost since then. The UI, the nudges, the winks, the games, the chaotic friend lists were all magic in a way that FB, WA, Slack, Teams, Discord, et al aren't.

Thats probably more to do with your perspective rather than anything to do with the clients. I find discord to be very exciting and it’s always a joy to use. The idea of persistent voice channels might not have been invented by discord but it’s where the average person really first discovered them.

Getting home and seeing a few friends on discord and joining in has always been a magic experience for me.

Are you saying average PC users never used TeamSpeak?

Power user gamers did. But the average person did not. The Discord user base is vastly bigger than teamspeaks ever was. Way more people have been introduced to the concept now and it’s spread way beyond gaming and PC power users.

> there was also some Duck app for macOS?

You are thinking of Adium (https://adium.im). I believe it was a port of pidgin/libpurple to cocoa/aqua (or whatever the macOS gui framework was back then).

Similar.

1. IRC

2. ICQ

3. MSN

4. IRC (again)

5. Skype and Facebook

6. WhatsApp

7. Facebook again

8. Still Facebook (very sticky)

9. IRC + Slack (some communities) + Discord (some communities) + Facebook/Whatsapp + Signal + Telegram + Matrix + Zulip

Yeah, I think we need a new libpurple.

Part of the lack of 'new libpurple' is that companies have grown much more adept at/focused on removing third party clients. Discord in particular, IIRC, will even ban users for using third party clients.

This was a problem even back when Gaim (now Pidgin) was at peak popularity.

I used to be a dev on the team, and we had our accounts banned all the time. Some of the IM services didn't mind us being there (MSN seemed more than fine with it, and we reportedly had fans within the team there, though future protocol versions made it harder for us to figure out).

Yahoo wanted us off and did everything they could to keep us from connecting. Changing auth schemes to increasingly-elaborate obfuscated methods, at one point throwing pages of what looked like equations at us.

AIM would have been fine with us if we had used TOC (their open source protocol), but OSCAR is where all the features were at. They didn't outright ban clients, but my understanding is that their lawyers were involved at one point (though I think mainly due to the name "GAIM").

But you're right, they are removing third-party clients more. And fewer protocols are unencrypted plain text, which makes it harder as well. Still, work continues.

I started with Talk - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) But I guess that's because I'm Gen-X

Thank you! I remember that I had started on a chat system right before IRC, but could not for the life of me remember its name; though i knew that it was a simple name. Talk was the first thing that i started on, but once i learned that IRC allowed me to connect with folks around the world (at the time, Talk was limited to the single unix server that users were connected to, though that constraint was expanded beyond that later on if i recall correctly). Man, i remember those early days; what fun to marvel at chatting with others either across the university campus or - later on - across the world!

Before the IRC were telnet chat rooms/servers for me. Nobody has mentioned them here so I wonder whether it was local thing.

I remember using talk about the same time, but telnet ones had more edge in UX side.

I've been using Matrix + bridges to fill that gap. I use IRC, Telegram, Google Chat, Discord and WhatsApp all via bridges, so I only have to interact with a single interface and all my chats are in the same place.

Before that I used first Trillian, then Pidgin. Then seeking persistence across clients I started using bitlbee to access everything through IRC, but that really sucked for media-heavy things like Telegram. My current setup of my own Matrix homeserver + bridges has been working great and feels way more liberating than using 6 different apps.

Which bridging software do you use for some of these? I looked into doing something similar, but all of the ones I saw (at least for Discord) require manually duplicating each Discord channel in Matrix, and it looked to be a bit of a hassle.

I use matrix-appservice-irc, mautrix-{googlechat,telegram,whatsapp} and mx-puppet-discord.

I don't use Discord all that much and I just bridge a few specific rooms I'm interested in, but I think you can bridge entire servers at once as well.

this, but I bridged them all to IRC by custom means, which is the easiest to implement and allows people on all platforms to talk in the same channel-equivalent. the media issue is solved by using a more modern client that can generate embeds (e.g. glowing-bear for weechat-relay).

Do you manage to get pictures, audio messages, videos and reactions to work well in both directions with that setup?

Also, I use this for personal messages as well as group chats. The people I interact with don't even know I am not using the native client.

custom reactions aren't rendered irc-side, mostly because I can't be bothered, but @mentions and all other platform-specific messages are properly translated. I considered forgoing the channel bridge and writing a custom IRC server that mirrors a discord/matrix group, but I never got around to it.

> Yeah, I think we need a new libpurple.

libpurple still exists and even has plugins for a lot of the protocols you mention, so no need to move away from it.

My path, which began in 1997:

1. IRC

Before: IRC + XMPP.

Today: IRC + Matrix.

> (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)

I believe you're referring to Adium [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adium

Don't forget Trillian!

I still use it. But all it is good for anymore is a google chat/hangouts desktop app. It was nice gluing all of them together like pidgin.

Woah! My Trillian-lover friend also used KVirc quite a lot. Actually, not sure it was called KVirc, but something like that.

I'm the proud owner of a six digit ICQ number. What a time that was.

It's funny. Having a similar trajectory of chat clients, I'd say my migration in my teens was dictated by "which service were the girls I wanted to talk to using?" In my 20s it was "what preserved my session as I ran around town and logged into various dumb terminals" until finally "what worked best on mobile."

Now that I'm married in my 40s, it's "which service are the guys I want to talk to using?"

Would probably include ICQ in the list for #2

What no ICQ? I got off the train before FB Messenger, personally. I don't think it was 'required' to have an app anymore once texting became free. And now everyone's on iMessage, except for Android users like me.

Haha, nice.

My journey was:

1. ICQ, because my gamer friends used it.

2. Added IRC, while it felt already outdated, somehow a bunch of my Japan-nerd friends used it.

3. Added AIM, YIM, MSN, because girls and my parents used them.

4. Switched to Trillian, because it wasn't managable otherwise.

5. Everyone moved to Facebook Messenger.

6. Everyone moved to WhatsApp

7. Now and then some friends switch to Signal, Telegram, or another "secure," alternative to WhatsApp.

8. Started working remote and everything is Slack and Zoom.

9. Dabbled in Web3/crypto and everything is Discord

1. Odigo & web based chats

2. ICQ

3. Trillian & QIP, mostly to connect to ICQ

4. Facebook chat

5. Google Hangouts, Allo, gmail chat

6. Back to Facebook Messenger because all my contacts use it, Slack for work

Facebook Messenger originally used XMPP, and for a while, you could use it with Jabber clients, Pidgin, Adium, etc.

No icq? There was a time when the first thing you installed on your computer was instant messaging applications. It's how you kept in touch with friends online. Crazy how quickly it fell off.

As an Indian millennial, my journey was a bit different:

1. Yahoo messenger (2001/2 - First internet experience)

2. Yahoo messenger + Text (2003/4)

3. Text + Skype (2006/7)

4. Whatsapp + FB Messenger + Skype (2010)

5. Whatsapp/iMessage + Instagram (2016/17)

GTalk - you could install it without admin and it was blazing fast.

I did ICQ (some IRC), then ICQ via Trillian, MSN Messenger, GChat, Imessage/Facebook/Instagram (sigh).

For work it was Slack and then MS Teams (again sigh).

ICQ and teamspeak/ventrilo we’re in the mix for me as well

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