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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a cynical joke, but for those people who don't use Voice, it's sadly what's really happening.

I want to get off Google products for many reasons, but the main reason is becoming that I can't trust them to listen to users.

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Rereading it I can see how it might sound like a joke... it's not. Truly very sad, they let you go back to using the old interface but sometimes you get jolted back into the new one and there's no way to access some of the old options... maybe if you have a really old browser user-agent you can trick it into only giving you the old interface?

For people that use Google Voice, that's often the hardest Google service to leave. You can get similar features with https://jmp.chat/ - it supports text and picture messaging (and voicemail transcription) and you can port in your Google Voice number to make the transition seamless for your contacts.

But how do I know they'll be around in a year or let me save my number?

As with all carriers that offer US (and Canadian) numbers, they are required by law to let you port your number away. So you can always bring your number elsewhere if they decide to close up shop.

And if that happens, likely someone will setup another instance and keep the same service running. That's another great advantage of JMP over Google Voice: all the code is free and open source, so anyone is free to run their own instance if they like. In fact, you could run your own instance right from the start and then be in complete control of whether JMP keeps working for you.

Thanks. Am I correct in assuming this is your project?

How long have you been working on it? What's the exit strategy look like? How big is the team currently?

I noticed that your blog hasn't updated in over two years, while I recognize that making blog posts is time-consuming, when it comes to software that just gives the feeling that the author has abandoned the project. Maybe consider linking to an area you still frequent?

https://jmp.chat/ is a project I started, yes. There are about a dozen other people who work on it to varying extents (you can get a sense of this from the commit logs, some of which are linked below).

Based on https://gitlab.com/ossguy/sgx-catapult/commits/master and https://gitlab.com/ossguy/jmp-fwdcalls/commits/master it looks like I've been working on JMP's codebase for a little over 13 months now. Prior to that I worked on JMP's precursor (see https://github.com/ossguy/sopranica - also called "Phase 0"), which started about 4 years ago, and was more part-time.

Since I and a lot of my friends depend on JMP for their everyday communication, I'm not really interested in "exiting". If the project were to be sold, it would have to be to someone who cared about keeping the software free and open source, and who wanted to keep it on a federated network. I suspect going public would be a bad idea, because most of the public (i.e. investors) doesn't(/don't) care about JMP's values.

We publish an update on JMP and related projects every 1-2 months. We recently started using Mailman so you can find the past couple updates at https://soprani.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/jmp-news and signup if you like. For day-to-day updates, you can join our group chat at https://anonymous.cheogram.com/discuss@conference.soprani.ca (more options for joining are at https://jmp.chat/#support , including directly from your XMPP client). That's where the majority of project-related communication happens.

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