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.
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.
Matrix
I used to use Google hangouts since it worked with Pidgin and other 3rd party apps. As soon as they nuked Hangouts I spun up a Matrix instance, got all my family on it, and haven’t looked back. It’s been excellent.