bitlbee VS purple-discord

ah didn't realize it had gone away. its successor appears to be [0]

now I'm reliving the chaos of the late-00s/early-10s instant messaging apocalypse when AOL sunsetted AIM. Clients like Trillian were absolutely necessary before AIM shut down. Everybuddy was a good linux-friendly client. When I still spent time on IRC, I really really liked Bitlbee [1] with ERC [2].

(I'm not saying that there's a connection there, but rather that all the chat protocols started getting used less around the same time for the same reason, which was smartphones becoming commonplace in late-00s.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayttm

[1] https://www.bitlbee.org/

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/erc.html

I use purple-discord (libpurple/Pidgin plugin) + BItlBee (IRC chat gateway, libpurple variant) + Quassel (distribued IRC client, like a bouncer) on a home server, and use Quasseldroid to connect on mobile. I would eventually like to simplify this setup.

I used to have a similar setup to use IRC for everything using https://www.bitlbee.org. Fun times!

Another approach to this is to use bitlbee's twitter support and your favorite Emacs IRC client to access that. This is especially nice if you are using bitlbee anyway.

I use purple-discord (libpurple/Pidgin plugin) + BItlBee (IRC chat gateway, libpurple variant) + Quassel (distribued IRC client, like a bouncer) on a home server, and use Quasseldroid to connect on mobile. I would eventually like to simplify this setup.

Software options that I don't think have been mentioned yet is the Pidgin messenger + Discord plugin. https://www.pidgin.im/install/ + https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord

I've switched to Pidgin with the discord plugin. Pidgin has plugins for just about any chat protocol. Of course if Trillian's devs ever decide to support Trillian again and connect to some active service, I'd come back.

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord

Its about the same as any other Pidgin protocol (no audio AFAICT), with some support for some of the features of Discord like reactions. It gets updates for new features sometimes. The author has written a lot of different libpurple plugins and is quite busy though.

Note I've heard you can get banned from Discord for not using the official client.

I've been using purple-discord for years now and have yet to be banned. Obviously this isn't usable on Android yet as far as I know there is not a libpurple based chat app on Android, but you can make it work with a lot of setup.

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord (Plugin for https://www.pidgin.im). https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (proprietary, closed-source Shareware)

You can also use it in Pidgin with this plugin. Discord is just a bunch of fancy JSONs wrapped into a web-based client, after all.

You may have heard of Pidgin - the neat IM client supporting lots of protocols such as IRC, XAMPP and many others. One of its major features is its extensibility with plugins, and that's where things get interesting. Apparently a Pidgin plugin exists which lets it connect to Discord and do basic things such as sending messages and images with basic IRC limitations such as previous messages being cleared upon leaving. However I think it's still a much better experience compared to the bloated web client. So, a quick disclaimer - using anything other than the official Discord client is against the TOS. They won't outright ban you for it in most cases but still be warned. So in order to get this working you need an older version of Pidgin because 2.14.7 seems to not be working properly with XP. I've had great success with 2.14.1. Here's a quick link to the 2.14.1 installer. Next, go to the plugin's github page and download the 2 linked DLL files under the 'Windows' section in the readme. Put libjson-glib in the Pidgin installation folder and libdiscord in the plugins folder, then restart Pidgin. Next, go to Accounts and set up your Discord account after which you will have your servers pop up in your buddy list. It's this easy! https://imgur.com/WMBHXY2