I remember using Pidgin in ~2009. A dozen chat networks, all on one app. Desktop software built with a native GUI toolkit. And, on top of all that: you could keep your chat logs forever. The world of yesterday.
I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.
"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".
There was a plugin called "Off The Record" (OTR) which would do a pk exhange and then send cipher text over the channel. It was rad. You could have e2ee over Facebook Messenger. When you opened the chat in the Facebook web ui, all you could see was the cipher-text.
Then Facebook started blocking 3rd party clients and Pidgin et-al slowly faded away.
Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.
Theoretically there is regulation now that should allow an app like this again here in the EU.
Currently it is in the "malicious compliance" phase.
> you could keep your chat logs forever
Or delete them!
Trillian too. Messaging back then was so much better.
And me using Adium on Mac ~2006. Of course rose-tinted glasses and everything, but it was a great experience.
It's not rose-tinted glasses. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern. You could theme it however you wanted, you had full control, and it was actually smooth and not clunky.
I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.
You can still use Beeper[0] and similar. The key issue with this type of application is that some networks have put more resources to detecting them and gotten more hostile to users of it - mostly those who tie ad revenue directly to messaging (although officially it's to avoid spam + detect compromised accounts).
I was surprised to see that Beeper actually has support for ‘local bridges’ that connect to services on-device (which reduces the risk of bans and removes Beeper as the middleman).
I was unsurprised to see that (at least with the local Instagram bridge), Beeper is extremely inconsistent with push notifications and sometimes has messages missing in the chat.
I had that experience on my phone (Nokia n900) all of them went through the messages app.
I miss it.