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stevoski

This makes me somewhat nostalgic for the days when I would regularly encounter software that used Sparkle for updates.

The days when I’d mostly use downloadable native software for my Mac.

The days when most of the software I regularly used had a somewhat consistent UX.

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I miss Adium.

Indeed. That thing was a gem.

I miss the world in which software like Adium was possible

It still is. Matrix, and other federated platforms, are exploding in popularity.

You could start here, if you are interested, to get a taste: https://matrix.org/docs/chat_basics/matrix-for-im/#creating-...

I don't think this is what was meant by Adium being possible. At its peak, Adium acted as a single frontend to many different instant messaging networks to provide you a single user interface for chat. Today, we've regressed to a point where this is no longer really feasible; every network requires its own client.

Matrix has bridges, which allow you to send/receive messages to other services like Slack or Discord.

https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

Also, as a different approach, to some degree Ferdium can act as a central place for various messaging platforms even if the integration that Pidgin (and Adium) and libPurple provided is not possible this way. Station is similar and a bit better but is in desperate need of developers. Both are FLOSS.

https://ferdium.org/

https://getstation.com/

So do I, so often. I made an Adiumy animation pack for my university that actually got mildly popular, and it was amazing. Such a quality app, and so nice when communication systems were standards not apps.

Well, they weren't really standards by design either, people just reverse engineered their protocols. One could still do that, it's just that... nobody does anymore?

The countless matrix bridges[1] to Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, etc. that are actively maintained, together with dozens of Pidgin plugins[2] serving similar purposes suggests otherwise.

Granted, I don't expect Pidgin plugins to be well maintained compared to the Matrix appservice bridges. But still, there is at least one protocol that bridges to almost everything, and that's Matrix. For several years I used Matrix as little more than a glorified IRC and Slack client.

[1] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

[2] https://pidgin.im/plugins/?type=Protocol

Oh no, people have tried to reverse-engineer apps like Signal or Discord. The problem is that the company starts aggressively banning every user of the reverse-engineered clients, as well as mounting legal attacks on their authors.

Seeing Adium and the message themes is one of the big things that made me want a Mac believe it or not. It looked so pretty.

Looking at the git repo, seeing the last commit being three years old is a bit sad. Someone sat down one day created a patch and committed it, and then they went away, to work on other things, leaving the git repository in a digital limbo.

I still use Adium as an XMPP client. It has a fair share of bugs due to existing Cocoa APIs rotting, but it still works perfectly fine for the one XMPP server I browse (which has OMEMO encryption enabled!)

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