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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Signal allows you to backup your messages. It’s under Settings > Chats > Chats Backup.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.