Yes, I remember using Pidgin, awesome times.

Adding to that Pidgin has a nice plugin called OTR that enables E2EE regardless of the platform/transport being used. OTR exists for Weechat [1] as well.

[1] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr

Signal encryption was born out of OTR, because of the need to do the key exchanges while one party is offline.

I am not a fan of offline key exchanges through a centralized privacy-focused server. Moxie knows why too. I wish he could come here so we could have that discussion. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I prefer military procedure of go for authentication in an out-of-band communication and verifying via voice each others key fingerprints or better, physically exchanging keys in person.

ICQ as well

WarSheep

I miss this a lot. Trillian and Adium were a couple of other clients that allowed this. It was really nice to have some choice among what client to use.

I fondly remember iChat from my younger years. XMPP was incredibly powerful -- I would kill for a single client app for signal, telegram, facebook messenger, whatsapp, and more today.

I've been thinking about building one. I currently have too many other projects though, so this is going to be my next one, when I'm more or less satisfied with my ActivityPub server. It's so strange that no one has even tried to fill the niche for a modern desktop multi-protocol IM app. The one I have in mind would be properly-desktop though — multiple windows, 100% native controls, complete ignorance towards touchscreens, etc.

KDE has a built in chat client that seems to do the job most of the time. What's severely lacking there is client support.

Because of it libraries for all kinds of services exist already. KDE Telepathy sounds pretty close to what you're describing (native (Linux) controls, multi window, no touch screen design, plenty of different protocols).

With the KDE project slowly seeming to move towards Matrix rather than XMPP I wonder how long Telepathy will stick around. It can still be a pretty good start for your own chat application, though, as large portions of the work have already been done for you.

An alternative approach I've seen people take is what I'm doing myself: Matrix/XMPP combined with various bridges. That way the chat client only needs to speak one specific protocol. It has its downsides but it does save you from having to develop abstractions over abstractions. You also get multi device support for free without having to scan tons of QR codes if you need to reinstall your client for whatever reason.

I looked at the screenshots of KDE Telepathy and I'm not convinced. This kind of multi-protocol IM client exists for every major desktop OS — this and Pidgin for Linux, Adium for macOS, Miranda for Windows, etc. The problem with all these apps is that they're not modern. They do great for text messages, but that's it. Anything beyond text is an afterthought if implemented at all. What I mean by "modern" is first-class support for all the IM features people now take for granted: media attachments, server-side history with search, replies, mentions, reactions, forwarding, bot features, channels, etc. None of these existing apps even try to do any of this. This is what I want to fix with my future project.

XMPP is still around and alive. Have you seen https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/ ? No need to resort to murder.

The lack of proper group support as indicated by the readme would make this bridge entirely useless to me.

There are individual bridges out there that can fix that, though.

> I would kill for a single client app for signal, telegram, facebook messenger, whatsapp, and more today.

https://www.beeper.com

Matrix can do a lot of that using bridges.

I still use pidgin daily for jabber, slack, and a custom protocol I wrote for the chat feature in my company's product.

It is great having a unified tool with minimal resource usage that is fully integrated into your platform.

It was not the client but all the companies using Jabber/XMPP protocol for their products.

Many clients including Empathy and Kopete allowed this at the time.

That's not really true. These clients often reversed engineered other chat protocols and thus supported services that didn't support Jabber / XMPP. This was before e2e encryption was the norm so it was easier to do.

These were all multi-protocol clients supporting more than XMPP because MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM all had their own thing. I believe Facebook was always its own thing but they exposed an XMPP proxy. Only Google Talk really relied on XMPP from the start but it was pretty much a token player in the market until two things happened: 1. They integrated with Gmail making Google Talk readily available to Google’s entire Gmail user base without installing a separate Windows-only client (or finding a compatible messenger, iChat ended up natively supporting XMPP within a couple of years) and 2. Instant Messaging went into rapid decline as users switched to mobile-first messengers (IMing was always a desktop-centric experience and the various pre-existing protocols were not battery efficient and you typically had to have the client open and active to be signed in).

My fave was Miranda-IM. Windows-only but did a wonderful job of sticking to native windows API and so was very lightweight and native-feeling in an era when that really mattered for performance.

For a brief period Facebook was the biggest XMPP server, it was fun using OTR[1] on Facebook messenger. I think Whatsapp is still using XMPP under the hood but the server is closed.

[1] https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/OTR

I remember they eventually added a feature to pretty-print OTR’d messages as something like <OTR encrypted message>.

When I saw that I figured they were aware and would soon start blocking it.

OMEMO appears to be superior to OTR last time I looked.

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html

Google Hangouts used to use xmpp too.

The bigger they get, the less they want to interoperate.

Bringing back old memories of using Pidgin all the time. I miss having one service for all communication.

You can do that today with Matrix and whatever client you want (albeit with much more friction than what was previously possible).

There a bunch of bridges[0] available for pretty much any communication network you can think of and some people even go so far as to use their Matrix client for email too.

[0] https://matrix.org/bridges/

Libpurple powered the messaging on Nokia N900. It was really a great experience, seamlessly using the same app for SMS, FBM, Skype, Google Chat and few others.