In the 2020s you might be forgiven for having forgotten that such a thing as a native chat client exists, but a handful still do and they’re still useful. One of these is Pidgin, the artist formerly known as GAIM.
It is still around and still works with a surprising number of protocols – and after the current, second alpha version, Pidgin 3 itself will soon arrive. The thing is, it has been coming for a long time now – the project has been underway for about 16 years.
Project lead Gary Kramlich announced the new version last November. This was followed by a first preview release, numbered 2.90 on the first day of 2025. At the start of this month, the second preview release appeared, with a preliminary version number of 2.91.
But let’s talk about native chat clients and why they matter. Most chat and messaging services now are web apps, just blobs of Javascript: while technically they may execute on your CPU, your messages are in the cloud somewhere – the service merely lets you see them, not keep them. Worse still, that Javascript is often minified and munged into unreadability, and it’s probably proprietary to boot.
Discussions in chat channels are often an essential part of a organizations’s knowledge base. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to want to keep, maybe store in a database, index and search it. Perhaps you just want to use your own UI for the service. Well, tough. If it’s some SaaS effort, you can’t.
True, there are a bunch of web-based multiprotocol clients out there, and we’ve written about a few before. The Reg FOSS desk has been using Ferdium daily, ever since Franz and then Ferdi stopped receiving updates. This class of app is very handy, but they have several drawbacks: each tab has a different UI, and they have an alarming appetite for RAM – forget about using an 8GB machine – and of course, your messages still aren’t yours: they’re out in the cloud somewhere.
Pidgin is a native – meaning not web-based – multiprotocol chat client. It started out as a GNU client for AOL Instant Messenger – AIM for short – and so was called gAIM. However, over time it grew support for various other services, both proprietary ones such as Skype, ICQ, or Facebook Messenger, and open-standards based ones such as Jabber and IRC. Version 2.0 appeared back in 2007 with a name change to Pidgin.
Pidgin 2 is still maintained: 2.14 came out in 2020 and there have been another 13 minor point releases since. It has an impressive list of “trusted” plugins – we make it 239 – and even more third-party plugins. To be fair, not all of these connect it to different chat services, but many do: We count 65 additional third-party protocols. It can talk to most things, from Amazon Chime to Discord to Facebook to Signal to Whatsapp.
And there’s more: Pidgin’s formidable polyglot skills are available to other apps through its underlying communications layer, libpurple. Sadly, with the rise of web-based messaging systems, most are long unmaintained, but Finch is a text-mode client for Linux shell warriors, and Adium is a native macOS client.
However, although it’s extensible, Pidgin 2.x still has what its developers call in-tree protocols for AIM and some other long-gone services. (If you’re nostalgic for them, the Nina project is resurrecting AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN.) Removing these means a total rewrite, and after many years of gradual work, some of the fruits of the team’s efforts are finally appearing.
Whatever happens, we hope security is kept in mind, as a vulnerability in a message or protocol handler, leading to code execution, means someone can on the other side of the world ping you and potentially start taking over your device. All software has bugs, and a lot has flaws like these, Pidgin included in the past.
Pidgin 3 will use GTK4 natively, and for now, this preliminary version only supports IRCv3. It’s early days, but two releases so far this year suggest that significant progress is happening. The experimental builds are available on Flathub beta. ®
