Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I transferred my American number to Google Voice before I left the country and have been able to hold onto that number for over a decade.

Unfortunately, everything about Google Voice/Hangouts/Talk/Whatever-it-is now sucks. Trying to find someone is damn near impossible. I totally can attest to that. The removal of federated and regular XMPP was the wrong direction.

I'm in the wonderfully weird situation of not having a Gmail account either. I deleted it and ran my own mail server back in 2012. I use DavDroid/Radicle for contacts, so in the web interface, any contacts after 2012 that are SMS are phone number only. I have to use my phone to see the names.

I don't think it's even possible to find someone via gmail address anymore. Occasionally I'd find someone on Google Plus .. and have no freakin idea how the hell to send them a personal message (either in G+ or Hangouts).

The whole Hangouts/G+/Gmail ecosystem is awful. If you don't have a gmail account, it's beyond unusable. I pretty much just use Hangouts for legacy chats.

AIM/Yahoo/MSN all worked .. and now they're all gone (I think Yahoo is still there, but web only). Facebook was unreliable as shit and god awful until around 2013/2014. It took them that long to create someone their competitors had done better a decade ago.

Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made. They really seem to stop at v1 for almost all of their products and have not the slightest idea how to monetize them.

> Voice/Hangouts has felt like an abandoned application for many years, even though it's potentially one of the best products Google has ever made.

That's probably WHY Google Voice was one of the best products Google put out.

it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS

Exactly.

There's a reason users/clients have come to fear the Google acquisition of a product they've come to depend on and in which they've vested hopes of continued improvements and solutions.

At least Google hasn't outright put a bullet in Voice, yet.

Have any recommendations for commercially similar solutions, that also support a proper SIP interface?

I'm preparing for that day, when GVoice dies.

https://jmp.chat/ is a good alternative. Text and picture messaging over XMPP, and voice over real SIP (with voicemail transcribed to text).

There are lots of great XMPP clients, such as Conversations on Android, and Gajim or Adium on desktop. Or use https://movim.eu/ if you like a web client. iOS has a few options as well, including Tigase Messenger and IM+.

I use Google voice # + OBI220 device for home phone service, and hangouts on mobile/tablets. The home phone service using obi device in nice bc it's portable, the hangouts integration is fragmented, frustrating and unreliable

My understanding is that Google Voice has some partial cover in that it is the backbone of Google Fi.

And just try keeping a distinct Google Voice set up, if/when you sign up for Fi.

Unless you're very careful, they mush together your Voice and Fi accounts, irreversibly.

When Fi was in its early days, a lot of Fi users found this out the hard way and were pissed about it. People who'd been using Voice, maintaining a separate Voice #, and who wanted to keep it that way. Who DIDN'T want that number suddenly tied to a/their cell phone.

(Hint: Create a separate browser profile (not just a Google account, but an actual separate profile under its own sub-directory). Sign up for a different Gmail/Google account. Use one account for Google Voice, and the other for Google Fi. Don't accidentally cross-pollinate.)

So basically an anti-competition move from search? (Don't ask your friends, they're unreachable anyway. Use search instead!) Suitably dystopian, I like it.

Unfortunately, they recently remembered they have it and have begun removing features and options.

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.

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.

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?

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