Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattJ100 | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that Pidgin's development didn't manage to keep up with the changing times. Stable branch is 10-15 years behind XMPP features. The developers are working on a Pidgin 3.0 (rewrite?) but that still has quite some way to go.

Unfortunately Pidgin was one of the most popular ways to use XMPP back in the day, and this had a knock-on effect on XMPP's reputation as an out-of-date technology. People still install Pidgin today and tell me, yep, XMPP hasn't changed since 2006. Which couldn't be further from the truth.

View on HN

Was it that pidgin didn’t keep up with features, or more likely that one by one the major platforms pulled xmpp support to the point where there was no reason for a normal person to use pidgin?

It was both, and part of the reason platforms pulled support is that keeping up with XMPP was bad ROI.

You're Facebook. You want to provide an instant messenger you can iterate on quickly. You can put the work into making it XMPP-shaped and working with the community (whatever they means... Are you going to slip ship targets because Pidgin doesn't work as a client for your implementation?). Or you can just write and ship your own service and client at your own pace and not care about any other developer's needs or wants because you're trying to serve Facebook users, not developers.

There were never any major platform with good XMPP support except for Google Talk anyway. So not sure about "one by one".

Facebook? Or was that something else. All I remember is a golden age when between google and Facebook I had like 90% of my non work contacts available to chat with on pidgin. And my work used xmpp internally, it was glorious.

Facebook had a poorly maintained gateway into their chat system which spoke XMPP c2s (no federation). Was pretty much a hack to get people to stop asking for a Linux client until the web app became the only desktop option anyway.

Sorry Mattj, but thank you for saying these things kindly :)

It's true Pidgin 2's XMPP support sucks, there's no denying that. That said we can't easily fix that with the current API which is why Pidgin3/Purple3 is the only path forward.

That said, I'm pushing to have an experimental release of Pidgin 3 out by the end of the year. However it's only going to have IRC support right now because well there's only so many hours in the day especially when Open Source is your passion project and not your day job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com