is this good news?
On one hand, it's great Pidgin is still alive and thriving like this. I have plenty of memories using it to talking with friends, people from uni, crushes, etc. And it had tons of cool funny plugins - I used to use one that let you change your profile pic from several from a given directory, sort of like how a "wallpaper slideshow" thing works. Do try to do that now with Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal/Slack/whatever...
On the other hand, the thing I always complain about - the state od IM right now is absolutely miserable thanks to all those walled gardens that force you to use their shitty client "apps" because of "privacy" or "features" or whatever, so you end having to use a bunch of different "apps" to talk with different people. It's insane.
I cleaned up the language on the irc bit in the post as it was confusing people. But we are very much aiming to support everything including all the big chat networks. That's why so much of our internal API had to change.
This release is to get something out there even with limited functionality rather than not releasing until it's at feature parity with Pidgin 2.x which is going to take a long time on our current trajectory.