tl;dr: after pushing rcs so hard for years, killing hangouts well after forgetting about it, & hiding it from gmail, google now wants you to use its (and google allo’s) successor, google chat.
I always used to use Hangouts as my default chat app for friends. We had a big DnD group chat on it. But we migrated to WhatsApp when Google said they were going to kill hangouts and never looked back.
Why would I trust Google with my chats when they constantly abandon/kill off their best tools. We’ve now moved to Signal and I’m expecting to stay there for a long time.
I’ve seen a lot of buzz about XMPP lately (well, mostly in relation to P92 and corps killing FOSS projects). Beyond it being a comm protocol, I don’t really know much about it. Is it still in use?
