As Seirdy notes:
It just keeps getting more relevant. WhatsApp, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit…each disaster worse than the last. The companies in charge know that the users will just take it after having their autonomy taken first.
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seems like a lot of revisionist bullshit in this rant, eg:
WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters
WhatsApp rose because:
a) If was free
b) it used data vs sms/mms which was becoming cheaper
c) it was cross platform at the time (blackberry, android, nokia, etc)
d) It used your existing phone number as your identifier, so onboarding and finding existing contacts was swift
Exactly. People started using and are still using Whatsapp because it allows global, free communication. When it started getting popular, greedy service providers were still charging several euro cents for a few bytes of data sent via SMS, even to the same network, of course people went for the free alternative (I actually installed Viber before WhatsApp).
Nowadays it still has the advantage of being free when communicating abroad. I travel a lot, and calls from foreign countries, sometimes on different continents, are expensive and low in quality; a local data SIM on my dual sim phone allows me to call friends and relatives at home with the same ease as a normal phone call and without crazy costs.
It used your existing phone number as your identifier
Wait, people think of that as an advantage? For me, that has always been the reason I have refused to use it. It’s also why I never even tried Google’s Allo despite being a big fan. A chat application that isn’t using the phone network shouldn’t be tied to your phone number. It makes cross-platform support extremely awkward, and that’s noticeable in how poor What’s App still is for cross-platform use.
For people who previously used SMS and had their contacts saved in the phone’s pre-installed contact app, WhatsApp could use all those contacts out of the box.
Good article - but as it points out I am entirely powerless. I can’t move away from WhatsApp as everyone, absolutely everyone I know (in the UK at least) uses WhatsApp as their primary or only messaging app/service.
I sympathize. This kept me on Facebook far longer than I wanted to be. If I wanted concert dates, event invites from friends, etc, I had to use it. I cut that cord eventually, but I get invited to way less stuff than I used to.
The EU Digital Market Act is in place and WhatsApp was considered a gatekeeper for messaging so they will probably be forced to open up to other messaging networks, hopefully breaking the network effect
Well, there’s a question of how exactly are they going to do this.
XMPP? Everybody who had XMPP has dropped it. It’s not at all obsolete, but the fact is that companies don’t like it.
Closed federation between friends with some proprietary protocol (possible with XMPP too, though)? Well, so I’ll be able to write to WhatsApp users from Facebook Messenger or Viber. Doesn’t change much, TBF.
I mean, I can imagine them setting something up for identities and private messages from them going back and forth. But practically important features would likely still be locked.
You can, it’ll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Possible if they respect your opinion, not really if you are a weird guy with a disorder whom they like, but are not going to take as a tech authority or something.
I already had this with recommending Linux (and other Unix-like OSes). All my attempts to even talk about it were taken with zero understanding, but once another person tried Fedora and liked it, this started spreading like a virus.
Thing is… the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.
For its many… many… well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.
We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.
You can definitely backup and restore your messages with Signal. I think the app doesn’t allow to export to clear text, but you can use 3rd party tools for extracting the clear text from the backup, such as sigbak.
Plus, the app and protocol are open source, so if a feature has enough demand, someone will eventually implement it.
Ah! I’ll look into that - thank you!
Signal allows you to backup your messages. It’s under Settings > Chats > Chats Backup.
Not on iOS it doesn’t. They explicitly opt out of even iTunes backups made locally.
Asia is like Line, and maybe some other Chinese apps that I will never install.
The interesting part is, email is still working fine as alternative. I didn’t install any other message app cause email and whatever next iteration of gchat for me is enough. ( I will probably slowly migrate to proton email and some 3rd party cloud storage hosting instead of just use gmail and google drive for photos.)
But yeah, for the less tech oriented population, overcome the hurdle of use different app is really huge obstacles. (Like my mom still tries to share things with me through Line app, even though I teach her how to use email a couple times. it made search for older shares much easier.)
Give your mam Deltachat, it uses good old email. It was a miracle for me, so that with people friends that didn’t want to use xmpp or matrix I just use email thanks to Deltachat. Some of them even installed it and like it so far. Everybody has an email so I can reach plenty of people with DC.
Thanks, will check it out. :)
Absolutely agree. WhatsApp is the default in my country and all across Europe. For instance, I was on holiday earlier this month and the hotel I was staying in just contacted me through WhatsApp with check-in info. They hadn’t replied to earlier emails but defaulted straight to WhatsApp for communication. It would be a nightmare to move away from it at this point. At least it still doesn’t feel like a Meta app.
I’m in the UK, and I use Telegram. It’s far superior to WhatsApp, and has somewhat better ethics (for now).
Telegram doesn’t use end to end encryption by default.
I use Signal and Matrix and what have you but in the end if I want to be able to join in with communications with family and friends beyond a few specific people I need to use WhatsApp.
The article makes some good points, cooperation can easily get greedy when their platform gets too large. It does feel like it tries to connect FOSS to privacy, though, and that’s a bit more controversial, especially when it comes to the Fediverse. For a platform like Lemmy the most important thing is to share the post that you published, there is limited development time, security is hard, and when things go wrong it is hard to point at someone.
For example, sending private messages often leads to these private messages being readable by the admins of the instance. In the same way, instance admins can also see the email address that you provided. So we just have to trust the instance admin to be capable enough to protect our data and not leak it out on the internet.
Of course, these issues also exist in companies that want to push out new features to attract users instead of spending time to test if everything is secure. It simply is a difficult point for both FOSS and commercial software, and we need to hold both FOSS and commercial parties responsible for respecting our privacy. At least with FOSS, we can switch to a fork if a maintainer does not do their job well.
Yeah, as annoying as it is, unless you’re using messaging software that has been externally audited for security, you should probably assume admins/owners can read your messages.
Yet I disagree with the article in many points. It didn’t always belong to Facebook, and that’s how it started, originally it even asked for something akin to one dollar for one year of usage (it was converted to some very small amount for each country).
One should also understand that in countries like India, Brazil, and a few others SMS and Internet on phones are extremely expensive. WhatsApp provided a very nice way to bypass SMS and stay within the lower plans for internet usage on mobiles. The big advantage here was to use your work or home internet to still reach out to people.
I know that in Brazil telcos introduced an entry line phone plan at one time saying that Whatsapp messages would be exempted from data caps.
Eventually, Facebook bought WhatsApp.
Saying it is simple to replace WhatsApp without considering the economic situation of the people relying on it is absurd.
Comparing it to FOSS alternatives at the current stage is easy enough, but every attempt at creating a FOSS alternative didn’t take. It is not uncommon to see the FOSS software not prioritizing the functionality and needs of users, and that will have people flock to whatever is useful to them, despite possible hidden costs.
I say this as someone who uses Matrix for chat, yet there are some critical bugs in usability that developers just ignore (like doing something basic like sharing from IOS breaks the spec and causes errors to several others).
When things like these happen there is always someone who will come ahead and say “this is provided for free” or “learn to code and fix it yourself”.
Eventually we get Pikachu faces or articles talking about the greatness of FOSS while ignoring all the main point “people still need a stable tool that fits their economic power while someone argues about how to fix a problem they don’t really care about”. As someone who mostly uses open source software, this is really frustrating.
I didn’t get the part on Firefox too much: isn’t pocket just a way to serve (non user tailored) ads? As long as they don’t sell your data and its not invasive it should be fine…they have to sustain themselves is some way
And you can easily disable pocket.
I can’t speak for the author, but I have some feelings about the matter. Baking a proprietary service into an open source browser, and of course requiring accounts. Then the FF accounts merging with the Pocket accounts. I really wasn’t pleased.
Wait, do you mean that your ff account share data with pocket, whether you ever signed into it or not?
Oh I have no idea about that, but isn’t it the same account now? Because I remember receiving emails about accounts being merged. I don’t use Pocket or FF anymore so I am probably out of the loop.
This is where I’m at with Discord :/
Can confirm. I still have WhatsApp installed because otherwise, I can’t talk to certain friends.
I was forced to stop using WhatsApp a while back because they simply stopped supporting my phone, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to buy a new one just to use WhatsApp. I came to the conclusion that anyone that doesn’t bother reaching out e.g. via SMS isn’t a real friend anyway, and indeed it hasn’t affected me personally much. There are some people I’ve lost contact with completely now, but we didn’t have proper conversations when I still had WhatsApp anyway, so not much was lost.
I wish i do not have to use Whatsapp. Unfortunately, i have to for business purposes, as i am in part of the world where Whatsapp is the main chat app that everyone uses.
Fortunately i have two phones (personal and business), so Whatsapp is only on the business phone.
These were both fantastic articles
