purple-discord VS Quassel IRC

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

> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.

Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.

In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.

The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.

If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.

The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].

[1] https://quassel-irc.org/

[2] https://thelounge.chat/

Quassel IRC: A modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client. Tech Stack: C++, Qt.

You can use a bouncer to do this. ZNC is the most popular. Quasse is a different take on the bouncer, where you have a special client that logs into your Quassel server, and the server logs into IRC. Has certain advantages, like more seamless scrollback and so forth. A variant take on this is irccloud, which is probably the "best" if you just want something turnkey that works with minimal fuss. It has good push notifications, a good web client, and excellent mobile clients

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.

Personally, I use a self-hosted "Core" (server) of Quassel I compiled from source and host remotely. Attach to the Core "locally" on a ZeroTier LAN network through a persistent physically independent WireGuard/reverse proxy/edge node microserver using various open source apps (preferably compiled from source). On Android I use QuasselDroid and of course compiled from source .

I've been a massive user of IRC since the mid 90s... have written lots of bots, scripts etc plus set up plenty of stuff to deal with being able to disconnect your client without missing out on anything (currently use https://quassel-irc.org/ with the daemon on a VPS). I was even l33t enough to "read bitchx.doc" back in the day...

Quassel - Quassel IRC is a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client.

Seems really similar to Quassel (https://github.com/quassel/quassel/), though I don't believe that has a webclient...