We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the fourth alpha version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This release has an official version number of 2.98.0. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.0 which will be the release we consider ready for end users. You can read more about our development phases here.

The release can be found on Fastly but is also available on SourceForge. It will show up on Flathub Beta after awhile.

If you don’t want to use the Flathub Beta method, there are build instructions in the

README.md

for building a Flatpak locally or installing into a meson devenv. Both methods avoid installing directly to your Operating System installation which is the preferred method as there is no easy way to uninstall the application at this time.

About

Just like the previous releases, this is a timed release. It is a snapshot of what we currently have and is something we think developers and other tinkerers may want to start playing with. But it is not meant for end users.

Most things are not implemented, the user interface has had little to no polish, and there are so, so many bugs. As such we are asking packagers to please not package this for your users at this time as the potential support requests will be too much for us to handle.

Highlights

This has been a much shorter cycle but we still managed to knock quite a few things out!

User Interface Tweaks

We’ve made a number of tweaks to the user interface this release including but not limited to formatting usernames in the contact list and the account manager.

We’ve also added a default avatar if one is not set. We’re still far from fully supporting avatars, but this step was necessary before everything else.

I just realized that this is actually a bug because the Echo user has an avatar in the contact list..

Also we fixed searching in the preferences which is very handy!

IRCv3

Now that account setting strings can have multiple lines, we finally added an often requested feature of a list of commands to run after connecting to an IRC server, but before any channels are joined. We didn’t get to the user interface part of this yet, but were able to test by manually setting the account setting.

This is useful for setting user modes, maybe identifying to

nickserv

, and so on. But sensitive information should be avoid for now as it’ll be stored in the clear.

soju

We created a new protocol plugin named soju that implements the

soju.im/bouncer-networks

specification from the soju IRC bouncer. This protocol plugin connects to the “bouncer network” of a soju bouncer and then discovers your upstream connections and create them as IRCv3 accounts in Pidgin and routes them through your soju bouncer.

This also led to us starting to add properties to accounts to keep track of who is managing them. This will most likely make the managed accounts read-only, but that could change. We’re also hoping that this management API will make it easy to integrate with GNOME Accounts to help get users started more easily.

Maintenance

We also did a lot of random maintenance this release. Nothing too interesting. However, we did start working out the API to handle threads so we can support Zulip channels and in the process realized we could use it for conversation folders and even conversation spaces (groups of conversations), so those will be getting worked on in the near future!

ChangeLog

The full list of change can be found below.

Looking Forward

Alpha 5 is scheduled for 2026-11-26 and will have a version number of 2.99.0.

This cycle we moved from quarterly to monthly releases on the last Thursday of the month. We have chosen the last Thursday of the month to be our release dates as historically Thursday night was our release night.

We have a bunch of tickets entered for Alpha 5 and you can keep an eye on the Burn down Chart for Alpha 5 to stay informed.

As always, priorities and possibilities can and will change, so even if something is listed for this release that doesn’t mean it will be in that release until it’s actually completed.

Thank You!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Pidgin, it means a lot to us!

If you’re interested in contributing, you can check out our Contributing Guide to get started.

Also be sure to check out our merchandise store and if you’re feeling generous, you can donate to the project from our Donation Page.