Ask HN: What IM services do you use?
Which applications Hacker News readers use for communication with their friends/family? For chatting with co-workers/team members? Which is your favorite mobile IM app?
Whatsapp for regular day to day communication for personal use.
Very rarely, Skype. This is mostly for taking video calls from coworkers/freelance clients who haven't started using Hangouts video yet.
>> Text Message (iMessage), What's App, FB Messenger
For friends
>> What's App (generally) and Text Message (not iMessage)
For work
>> Text Message and primarily Skype [Our CEO read an article which stated Zuckerberg favours Skype at work due to less distraction
XMPP support. Video, audio, IM. It works great, including on linux.
WhatsApp: XMPP (fork) - Other Friends and Nearby Friends
All used interchangeably for work/personal use
Gchat for all my personal use
Hipchat for work
google handout for daily spring
hipchat for developers
google talk and fb for friends
some times Y!Messenger
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.