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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

> when people all of a sudden switched to a worse alternative, MSN

MSN wasn't a worse alternative to ICQ, MSN was faster and came with Windows, making it both easier to keep running at the background on the weak hardware of the time (i remember launching ICQ and waiting waiting waiting at the splash screen with the rotating petal colors and then the main UI was a mess of buttons, icons and all sorts of bloat) and it was just easier to get into.

ICQ did release ICQ Lite which was lighter but by then that was too late - and even that couldn't combat MSN coming bundled with Windows, meaning that people who didn't have any IM suddenly now had one.

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At some point I had MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and irc and pidgn came to save me.

There were also cool places to hang out like Yahoo Games or a few of the location based chat apps that were fun to connect to strangers and just chat.

Discord is so walled garden it's awful in this respect.

I also miss the VRML world builders like CyberTown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberTown

then you could try pidgin to connect them all from one app

Pidgin was pretty awesome, though its underlying library was so riddled with vulnerabilities…

I greatly enjoyed how with XMPP’s in-band registration you could do things like give each contact a unique XMPP address, only to be used with them. You could have unlimited (well, I never hit a limit) accounts, across a load of servers, proxies per account, unique OTR keys per account, etc.

I don’t think the UI has really been surpassed either, tbh. I really wish someone would do a modern rewrite of Pidgin in some memory safe language.

Responsibly disclosing security issues is paramount to software security. See https://pidgin.im/about/security/advisories/ for a full break down.

That said, the vulnerabilities in "libpurple" were way over hyped by someone who rightfully got kicked out of the security community. Most of those vulnerabilities were in fact in protocol implementations that are plug-ins to libpurple and not libpurple itself. I know it's a technicality, but hearing this blatant lie get repeated for over a decade is exhausting.

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