Friendica is a great decentralized social network. And the list of clients to use it that I’m aware of is getting longer, longer and longer. I just learned from the Friendica user AlfredツSK that you can use the well known Linux chat client Pidgin as a Friendica client. As with all the other clients I was posting tutorials here, it works through the StatusNet Api, that most Friendica servers provide. So, here comes another short tutorial, how to do it on Ubuntu/Debian systems (see the links below for instructions for other linux systems, Mac OSX and even Windows):

First of all, get Pidgin if you don’t have it installed:

sudo apt-get install pidgin

 

Then get the pidgin-microblog plugin:

sudo apt-get install pidgin-microblog

 

Open Pidgin for configuration:

Click on Manage Accounts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click on Add…

 

 

 

 

 

From the Selectbox Protocol choose Status.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enter your the Username, Server address (snarl.de in this example) and Password of your friendica account

Click Add afterwards

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it! You are using Friendica with Pidgin.

 

 

 

 

 

If you are using Linux but not Ubuntu or Debian check your distributions packaging manager to install Pidgin as described on the Pidgin website. For Mac users it is recommended to use Adium which uses the same core library as Pidgin. An instruction how to install the pidgin-microblog plugin (which should also work for Adium) can be found on the plugins website.

Pidgin is also available for Windows, but as it seems, the micoblog plugin has to be build to work on that platform. I didn’t look into that in detail.

Note: Be aware that Pidgin stores it’s passwords in a plain text file on your harddrive. If you feel uncomfortable with that, check out the pidgin-gnome-keyring plugin that saves your pidgin passwords to the gnome keyring.

How to use Friendica with Pidgin by Hauke Altmann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.