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By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.

AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.

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Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.

ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.

Unfortunately Pidgin's XMPP support today remains stuck in the 90s.

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