Gaim 3 Exists
49 points by grim
49 points by grim
There's some software I haven't heard of in 20 years. If nothing else, thanks for the 'member berries I guess.
Well it did get rename to Pidgin, but we are bringing the name back for a new gtk4 version of the pidgin2/gaim interface on top of purple 3 ;)
Wasn't "Gaim" no longer allowed to be used for trademark reasons because of AOL's "AIM" application? I vaguely remember that being the reason for the rename to Pidgin. If that's right, was there some formal deal to use it again, or it just... no one's worried about AOL suing them in 2026?
If you check the website...
The name Gaim was chosen to be nostalgic and honor our history, but mostly because the trademark that caused the original name change has since expired.
Cool! I personally find chatroom (and especially Discord-like) UIs a lot more comfy and inviting —which is why out of this wave of "reborn" chat clients Gajim looks the best to me so far— but I'm glad to see this exist :)
I personally find chatroom (and especially Discord-like) UIs a lot more comfy and inviting
Oh my word.
Discord is the single most hated piece of software on my machines. I detest it for its horrid eye-searing confusing and massively overcluttered UI.
We all know "one man's meat is another man's poison" but it's always shocking when what someone likes is specifically what you personally loathe with a passion.
See, I love it 'cause it lets you see everything you need at once. You don't have to search around for context or hunt for options! :D People's brains are weird, aren't they.
I think the real lesson is that one-size-fits-all solutions aren't.
There’s a functional discord plugin for pidgin 2 - alas the api for libpurple has changed with the newer dev efforts so it won’t work with pidgin3/gaim. There’s also rudimentary ones for WhatsApp and even signal
I don't really use any of the things that purple talks to anymore (apart from IRC, and I prefer a dedicated IRC client for that), but as a Gaim user from back when "OSCAR vs TOC" was still a hot topic, I sincerely appreciate this. Messaging is one of those computer uses that's so basic that people deserve to be able to interact with it in whatever way is most comfortable and unobtrusive to them.
Huh. My comment just vanished from my browser window.
Oh well.
FWIW in the last decade I've successfully had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Telegram, Google Chat/Hangouts, Skype, FB Messenger, and Slack. All worked well enough for my day job.
With a lot of extra work I got Whatapp to load but not connect. I never got Signal to talk to it, but Signal is a massive PITA.
It's not some obsolete 20th century tool -- it works well and allows escape from SaaS app hell.
If you don't mind sharing, I'd be interested in what other networks you're using.
Also you can revisit the OSCAR vs TOC debate with https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server
I've been thinking about using GraalVM to compile the protocol portions of the open source Threema and Signal Android clients into something that's usable on a desktop (so: using those protocols without the crutch of having a mobile device somewhere and routing everything through that and some web shim). Is that something pidgin/libpurple would be interested in supporting?
We decided awhile ago that we are no longer accepting proprietary protocols into our main tree [1] but we still want to encourage these protocols get support.
Per pidgin.im/plugins which is a list of all plugins that we know about for pidgin 2, it looks like threema support existed at one point [2] but it doesn't look like it's being actively maintained anymore. Maybe it still works and is fine, I don't know.
For signal, there is presage [3] which I think is the recommended one, but there's also signald [4]. I know presage is actively being maintained but they're from the same author.
[1] https://dev.to/grim/in-tree-protocols-14kl [2] https://github.com/hbruintjes/ceema/ [3] https://github.com/hoehermann/purple-presage/ [4] https://github.com/hoehermann/libpurple-signald/
Signald is probably a bad choice. From https://signald.org/
this project is no longer actively maintained. Use signal-cli
What's a "chat room interface"? It's listed as the main reason for existing, but the screenshots just show some very work in progress contact window, no actual chats happening.
I mean, ICQ had chat rooms, which basically looked like any other IRC client, if I remember correctly.
The chat interface itself isn't that different between let's say IRC and almost any modern equivalent, with the main difference mostly being inline images, preview cards etc. With some clients, one of the more noticeable differences would be the left-right chat "bubbles", but that doesn't seem to major, either.
What annoys me the most (and what actually does seem to be different here) is that everything has to be single-window these days, which looks a lot like over-reacting to MDI applications and floating toolbars, plus some good old cargo-culting of mobile interfaces.
A more chat room approach is something like discord, matrix, etc, where dm's can be harder to find/get too, and you're likely stuck in a single window.
Very glad to see Gaim still alive! It would be nice to see a list of protocols that Gaim supports on the page.
It's still very early in development. I was hopeful to have it to a point where you could send messages but I ran out of time, so it's just the announcement.
As for protocol support, it'll support everything that runs under purple 3 which is itself still in development.
Maybe I'm not the target audience for this, as I haven't heard of Gaim before and everyone who should want to use it knows what it is capable of, but a link to a documentation of supported chat protocols would be nice.
After looking through around 10 search results I landed on pidgin.im/plugins, but it's not clear if these are all the supported protocols or maybe only extensions to a set of 'core' protocols and it links to a seemingly more authoritative Discourse list, which has only like five entries.
This is just an announcement that it exists and is being worked on, but it will support whatever works with purple 3 which is the same core library that Pidgin 3 is backed by.
The Pidgin 2 stuff does not work because everything is/has being/been overhauled to be able to support modern chat features.
I'm glad to see the old style interface live on in this form :)
One thing I'm curious about, both for Gaim 3 and Pidgin 3: do they support fetching history from the server when scrolling backwards these days for protocols that offer that? I'd switched away from Pidgin a while back because history was too useful, but I could see myself switching back...