I don't think this is what was meant by Adium being possible. At its peak, Adium acted as a single frontend to many different instant messaging networks to provide you a single user interface for chat. Today, we've regressed to a point where this is no longer really feasible; every network requires its own client.
Also, as a different approach, to some degree Ferdium can act as a central place for various messaging platforms even if the integration that Pidgin (and Adium) and libPurple provided is not possible this way. Station is similar and a bit better but is in desperate need of developers. Both are FLOSS.
Looking at the git repo, seeing the last commit being three years old is a bit sad. Someone sat down one day created a patch and committed it, and then they went away, to work on other things, leaving the git repository in a digital limbo.
So do I, so often. I made an Adiumy animation pack for my university that actually got mildly popular, and it was amazing. Such a quality app, and so nice when communication systems were standards not apps.
Well, they weren't really standards by design either, people just reverse engineered their protocols. One could still do that, it's just that... nobody does anymore?
The countless matrix bridges[1] to Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, etc. that are actively maintained, together with dozens of Pidgin plugins[2] serving similar purposes suggests otherwise.
Granted, I don't expect Pidgin plugins to be well maintained compared to the Matrix appservice bridges. But still, there is at least one protocol that bridges to almost everything, and that's Matrix. For several years I used Matrix
as little more than a glorified IRC and Slack client.
Oh no, people have tried to reverse-engineer apps like Signal or Discord. The problem is that the company starts aggressively banning every user of the reverse-engineered clients, as well as mounting legal attacks on their authors.
I still use Adium as an XMPP client. It has a fair share of bugs due to existing Cocoa APIs rotting, but it still works perfectly fine for the one XMPP server I browse (which has OMEMO encryption enabled!)
