Given that google is shuttering hangouts sometime in the next year, I decided this was finally the time to bail out of it. It did a lot of different things.

Chat

One thing Hangouts gave me, was a chat system that I could easily use from my computer and my phone, and that didn’t super compress images when my wife and I would exchange kid pics when I was on a trip.

Signal looks like it will be my more or less full replacement for that this year. It’s based on an open and secure protocol, and there is an electron desktop app that seems to work quite well. It also seems to be where a critical mass of the folks I chat with regularly have landed, so nudging over the few stragglers will hopefully not be that hard.

Group Chat

I’m using Slack a lot for work, and for HV Open. Our completely dead IRC channel became a more lively rolling conversation once we moved that community to Slack. And it’s a much better place for a rolling conversation than this long standing group Hangout that we had going a year ago. I’m no longer actively involved in any open source project that uses IRC as their communications base (Home Assistant uses Discord which I start from time to time), so I haven’t run IRC for the better part of a year.

Video

The other thing that Hangouts gave me was convenient video platform that mostly just worked (even on Linux). Fortunately Zoom does that even better. Citizens’ Climate Lobby uses Zoom extensively, and I’ve been using it whenever I can instead of phone calls. Video is so much more expressive. We’ve even had pretty good luck linking in external participants to our CCL monthly meetings.

Hangouts video was also how I called home during business trips. There will be less of those in 2019, but I’ll see how zoom works on the mobile side this year.

Blogging

I really want to be blogging more often again. This blog is self hosted WordPress. We’ll see if this sticks once I’m back in the office and time slips away. While I’m not planning to drop out of social media in 2019, I do think that giving them less exclusive content is a good thing, and posting more here in the open is good. I use Feedly to read a lot of blogs, so if anyone else who reads this is also writing, drop your RSS url in the comments, and I’d happily follow you on the open internet instead of in a closed garden.

Email / Texting

Email is always good as well. You can always find me at sean at dague dot net. Easy enough. Email has inertia, I get it. Texts are good as well. I’ve tried to go out of my way and check in on folks a little more than I used to, which means my text messages are a thing now (and never used to be). We’ll see how many of those folks (who are not computer people) I can convince to hop to Signal this year.

I do wish Google didn’t auto abandon everything it created, but given that it does, at least there feels like there are good replacement tools now.