I use the Hangouts and Slack apps on my Android phone to read scrollback history for the time period when Pidgin is signed off, or to monitor channels in mostly read-only mode while away from my desk.

I find responding via swype infuriating and rarely worth the effort. It leads to very low information content since people use poor grammar and vocabulary when writing on a touch screen and having every third word randomly replaced with something else by the UX.

I'm a little disheartened at the state of IM clients and usage. Since Google's dodgy Hangouts and open XMPP slaying I've struggled to find a decent alternative to Gtalk. I liked the old client, the lightweight desktop one. Pidgin was a solid enough replacement, and apparently version 3 due soon ought to bring audio/video. That's all well and good, but to reach a minimum level of real privacy it would make sense to leave the Google ecosystem.

Well. I opened a Dukgo account last year and had a few contacts added to that, hoping to grow the list over time, but few Gmail contacts (most of my contacts) actually receive or can accept the XMPP invites anymore (those who've moved wholesale over to Hangouts?) and any that are added have the conversations logged at their end anyway. The 'Google owns most people's email' problem applies to chat, too, unfortunately. Add to that the barrier of setting up a new IM client or XMPP account, most folks are just not interested in leaving the convenience of Google-world.

At the moment I've got Finch set up on the Raspberry Pi (running on tmux), to be connected to whenever/from wherever. It's working quite well, but is obviously short on 'features'. Nice to not have to disconnect/reconnect constantly though, and pick up messages at my convenience. I do the same with IRSSI to a lesser extent. I'm not connecting to the Google contact list with it.

I did try out Jitsi, but found it to be nearly as much of a resource hog as Skype, a client I've been trying to extricate myself from, but have been forced to re-install for certain clients/contacts. As I mentioned above, the new Pidgin will be interesting.

It's really hard for me to understand how many people are happy to support Facebook/Skype/Google's walled-garden approach in this day and age. Now that the momentum behind the privacy debate is waning, I'm worried (perhaps annoyed, more accurately) that there's even less incentive for people to support an open and private IM client, be it XMPP/OTR or P2P-based.

So I'm left with a tiny contact list, mainly consisting of Google-based contacts anyway and wondering if it's time to give up on going private. To accept that people just aren't interested, and are happy to cede as much control as popular-company-of-the-day wants to take? The cost of not accepting that fact is a certain level of social cut-off. I do wonder if life is too short to worry myself about things like this. But life does go on after I'm gone, and I'd rather the future was open, or at least had open alternatives that people actually wanted to use.

Actual answer: Finch on RPi via SSH, back to email/phone for those who couldn't be added to the Dukgo contact list.

I actually like Hangouts in theory (GVoice/Skype/GChat in one!), but it's a bloated monster of an extension that absolutely should not run in-browser. Even on my relatively powerful computer, I disabled Hangouts in Gmail just to function. I don't understand why Google can't build something as lightweight and beautiful as Pidgin.

I'm fairly certain that I'm using Pidgin's XMPP functionality to communicate with others that are receiving their end in Google Hangouts.

Because while in the past, my primary reason for installing Pidgin was connecting to Google's excellent XMPP service, I now only have it hooked up to my Facebook account. I don't see any value in Hangouts. That's right. As creepy and closed as Facebook is, I still find it a much higher value service than Hangouts. Plus it actually lets me connect to people I know reliably.

Hangouts is the perfect example of taking a good service and throwing it in the shitters. I can barely use the official Android-client. It's just gone completely downhill.

It may not be too late for Google to recover from the terrible slope they've taken on ever since the persisted, user-hostile G+ fiasco, but I can't imagine the tarnish their brand has taken to ever have been worth it.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't permit Pidgin to use its current protocols. So while XMPP still works great for one-on-one chat, my group messages relegated to the Hangouts app. (As are video and voice, but that's much more understandable.) Which is odd, since XMPP supports multi-user chat.

I really like Hangouts for video chats, but I wish they'd allow me to outsource all text-based messaging to Pidgin. It's just a more elegant solution... and Google would still reap all the advertising information they can glean from my messages anyway.

I've debated several times switching over to the purple-hangouts plugin so that I can get proper groupchat support, but the last time I tried it wanted me to do some shady-looking stuff with signing into Google and using the Developer Tools to grab the authentication key.

I did see a reverse-engineered Hangouts client at some point; does anyone know if this works well enough?