For reference, Sparkle shows 2000 active users this week. Historically, Sparkle's been ~50% the actual number, but I have no clue if that's still a useful estimate. Sparkle recorded 5019 users the week after the most recent release Apr 27, 2017).
I feel confident that would go up if Adium didn't look like a dead project, and if it supported protocols people are using these days. As Gary has said, libpurple supports quite a bit more than what's currently available in Adium. On Sat, Jan 19, 2019 at 3:28 PM Gary Kramlich <g...@reaperworld.com> wrote: > > > > On Sat, Jan 19, 2019 at 12:38 PM Amelia Rose Khan <shawn.k...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> What is the benefit of Adium these days? I like the interface and having >> multiple services in one place but people have moved on to individual >> software that do 10 times more. Has the user base of Pidgin grown over the >> years? > > > The user base of Pidgin has been waning over the years, but a lot of that can > be accounted for by lack of releases/support because contributors have "lifed > out". That is, they started careers and/or families and they just don't have > time to contribute anymore. Three years ago (January 2016) when I took over > Pidgin my focus has been on getting Pidgin3 and libpurple3 released while > making the code base more approachable so that we can attract and maintain > new contributors which is something we've been struggling to do since the > early 2000's. > >> >> Are these protocols still growing or used by enough people to warrant them >> in one place? AIM Bonjour Gadu-Gadu Google Talk Groupwise ICQ IRC SILC >> SIMPLE Sametime XMPP Zephyr. Even people said in this thread they moved to >> Slack or some similar software and not using IRC. > > > Third party plugins have always been the life blood of Pidgin, adding new > unique features that wouldn't necessarily be considered into mainline > immediately. As such, there is a large list of third party protocol plugins > at https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ThirdPartyPlugins. You'll notice there's > a slack plugin there as well. We're still working on cleaning up the voice > and video bits in the 3.0 code base, but that is a priority now as people use > it every day. > >> >> I feel the issue is the number of developers who work on the project. A lot >> of the developers got busy with life and that is great. > > > Yep! See my earlier comments about "lifing out" :) > > > Thanks, > > -- > Gary Kramlich <g...@reaperworld.com> -- Matthew
