slack-libpurple VS bitlbee

Eion Robb has done an incredible amount of work in this space. His GitHub page[1] has tons of plugins, and I particularly appreciate the work he has done on the Matrix plugin to make it available to Windows users.

Lest you think this is less than cool because you don't use Pidgin, bitlbee[2] is a great tool to get slack (and others!) into your IRC client. I haven't run it myself, but I know that it heavily relies on purple[3] for its magic. I can tell it gets a lot of use, perusing the issues on the slack purple plugin[4] for example.

1: https://github.com/EionRobb?tab=repositories

2: https://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html

3: https://wiki.bitlbee.org/

4: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple/issues?q=is%3Aissue...

Unpopular opinion number one: James is not that bad. At least it can do video calls properly which is not something I would say of Slack.

Unpopular opinion number two: pidgi was better and I don't why we all decided as an industry to go to these ridiculously heavy memory hog electron based clients. I use Slack from Pidgin to this day: https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

Another alternative is combining bitlbee with slack-libpurple and using an emacs IRC client, such as the built-in ERC. I used this back when I wanted both Discord and Slack available in the same emacs.

It's not IRC, but there exists a working libpurple plugin that you just auth as with your normal user account:

https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

I just use it with Pidgin, but there are curses clients too (I'm aware of bitlbee, there are probably others) if you prefer the IRC-style experience.

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.