&gt; In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications...<p>Given that -AFAIK- Signal documents its protocols, I expect that there will be Pidgin support for it not long after the Signal desktop client moves out of population-limited beta and is officially released.<p>But yeah. It&#x27;s a goddamn crying shame that this new crop of devs have decided to not only reinvent Instant Messaging, but to do it in such a way that leaves us back in the same situation we were in in the 1990&#x27;s. [0]<p>That wheel keeps turning and periodically crushes us all, I guess.<p>[0] Of course, one <i>could</i> do the very same thing that was done back in the 1990&#x27;s and reverse engineer the new wave of chat protocols. We <i>still</i> possess general purpose computers that can be used to snatch the plaintext of conversations that they&#x27;re a party to that are sent over encrypted channels.