<story><title>Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client</title><url>https://pidgin.im/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>valbaca</author><text>oh pidgin. Throughout my life (as a millennial) chat went this way:&lt;p&gt;1. IRC&lt;p&gt;2. IRC, Yahoo messenger, Aol Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger (mostly based on your ISP in the early days)&lt;p&gt;3. All + Skype (video!! wow!) + Google messenger. *This was when pidgin was invaluable* (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;5. Slowly FB Messenger took precedence over even text messages as data plans became better&lt;p&gt;6. A decade passes...&lt;p&gt;7. The exodus off of Facebook begins and Discord takes over as a way to talk to your group of friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HeckFeck</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Some of it is certainly the cynicism of age and work life, but I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pidgin: The Universal Chat Client</title><url>https://pidgin.im/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>valbaca</author><text>oh pidgin. Throughout my life (as a millennial) chat went this way:&lt;p&gt;1. IRC&lt;p&gt;2. IRC, Yahoo messenger, Aol Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger (mostly based on your ISP in the early days)&lt;p&gt;3. All + Skype (video!! wow!) + Google messenger. *This was when pidgin was invaluable* (there was also some Duck app for macOS?)&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;5. Slowly FB Messenger took precedence over even text messages as data plans became better&lt;p&gt;6. A decade passes...&lt;p&gt;7. The exodus off of Facebook begins and Discord takes over as a way to talk to your group of friends.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dijit</author><text>Similar.&lt;p&gt;1. IRC&lt;p&gt;2. ICQ&lt;p&gt;3. MSN&lt;p&gt;4. IRC (again)&lt;p&gt;5. Skype and Facebook&lt;p&gt;6. WhatsApp&lt;p&gt;7. Facebook again&lt;p&gt;8. Still Facebook (very sticky)&lt;p&gt;9. IRC + Slack (some communities) + Discord (some communities) + Facebook&amp;#x2F;Whatsapp + Signal + Telegram + Matrix + Zulip&lt;p&gt;Yeah, I think we need a new libpurple.</text></comment>