Hacker News Reader

Comment by drankula3 | Hacker News Reader

It's funny this post is being created now. Google Hangouts was the primary method that my wife and I used to chat. I could talk to my wife while she was at work, even if I had no idea where my phone was. Its shutdown prompted me to look for an alternative. We ended up switching to an XMPP client, and we plan on creating an XMPP server for ourselves on a cloud instance so we know the conversation won't be intercepted by non-state actors.

I don't know if it will ever reach the popularity it once had, but XMPP is useful to us at least.

View on HN

Somehow, Pidgin's GTalk integration still works. I have no idea how, considering GTalk was shuttered in 2014 and Google Chat within Gmail sometime in 2017/2018, but Pidgin still works.

For all of the despair that people are expressing I think quite a few people are going back to Gopher, XMPP and other open and efficient (e.g. not "blockchain") protocols.

I run a gopher site/hole. but like, the users for that would be a small percentage even on a site like HN. In the wild, I'm going to guess it hasn't cracked a point.

Not exactly a renascence.

Wasn't Gopher fairly un-open model (initially) one of the reasons HTTP/HTML became so much of a thing in the first place?

I still use hangouts on my phone and via https://hangouts.google.com/ everyday.... what am I missing?

It is scheduled to be shutdown.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/the-great-google-han...

I wonder how this impact Fi, my understanding is Fi uses hangouts for all the VoIP/Wifi calling. I use Hangouts to handle all my text messages too...

They have been slowly moving thing off hangouts, and I imagine they will just shutdown the IM part of hangouts to start with.

you can use hangout for Fi text messaging, but it's not required.

I thought Fi and GSuite already didn't get along ?

I still don't understand what I'm supposed to use instead, as a consumer. Are Google users just not allowed to IM each other anymore? We have to switch to Google's Slack clone?

It's a big pity. Even though it's a walled garden, Google technologies have the advantage that at least most people have a Google account. To replace it, I have Whatsapp, Signal and Telegram running on my phone. I need all of those (and messages.android.com) running on my PC.

I guess Google couldn't figure out how to monetize it.

Your link says, and it is also my understanding, that this only affects GSuite users, not the majority of Hangouts users. Is there any indication that most people will be affected ?

Yes. "Hangouts Classic" goes away for GSuite users Oct 2019, and they get migrated to "Hangouts Chat".

"Hangouts Classic" is going to be shut down at some unspecified date after that. All users will eventually be migrated to "Hangouts Chat" - GSuite users are just getting pushed first.

Hangouts, from what I can understand, is simply being split into Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. Not shutdown. Why split it up? Who knows? But, the current version still works, and Chat should probably meet most people's chat needs (assuming it's not completely gutted).

> We ended up switching to an XMPP client

Could you say what clients do you use?

> we plan on creating an XMPP server for ourselves

This surprisingly took less effort than I anticipated when I set up mine (from this [0] list) and I can see most of this modules were incorporated into "core". There is also ejabberd.

[0]: https://serverfault.com/questions/835635/what-prosody-module...

> Clients?

We use Xabber on our android phones, and I use Pidgin on my laptop. It works well enough, though Xabber is a bit annoying as it leaves a notification on the screen all of the time. Pidgin also doesn't come with OTR natively for some reason.

Thanks for the link! I'll definitely look over it again when I finally decide to set a server up.

Checkout conversations[0]. It isn't free, but is way better than Xabber imo. It also does e2e encryption unlike Xabber.

[0]: https://conversations.im/

It's free on F-Droid and there are a couple of free forks and rebuilds. It's also available for the Google Play family library (so it's one buy for moderate sized families).

However Daniel really took XMPP and ran with it: That XMPP is still feasible is in no small part thanks to him, so if you can spare the money that's a simple way to show appreciation.

> We ended up switching to an XMPP client, and we plan on creating an XMPP server for ourselves on a cloud instance so we know the conversation won't be intercepted by non-state actors.

Why create something from scratch when there are a couple of good and solid implementations Tigase XMPP Server (https://tigase.net) and OpenFire in Java, ejabberd in Erlang, Prosody in lua…

Google 'Hangouts' chat still exists inside Gmail

I'm still able to use it in Pidgin as well.

also the Hangouts Android app is still going

I think the Google Plus redesign was the beginning of the end. Changing Google Talk into Google Hangouts and trying to be more like Facebook began the process of killing what used to be a great platform.

Good piece on that here: https://www.tnhh.net/posts/google-talk.html

It's funny because the last aggregator I remember (~2011-2012) using was Meebo - whose founders were eventually hired by Google. If there was a service they didn't support I couldn't tell you what it was.

I also run a XMPP server for some friends. It works quite well. It's also nice to have my own domain to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com