Every single person I know or meet uses WhatsApp. About 90% of the businesses I interact with use WhatsApp Businesses. My whole family uses WhatsApp.
Moving to another system is going to take a lot a lot of work.
Say it with me.... M O N O P O L Y
In business there isn't a monopoly just yet teams and slack are way more common
So, if WhatsApp eventually fails, can we accept for at least just this once, to move on to something that is not proprietary and owned by a large company, please? Please, for the love of everything can we please for once move on to something that is open source and for just this once not repeat the same fucking mistake over and over again?
Nope. Ease to use will always triumph over open source
We've got all these devs volunteering time to these FOSS projects but rarely do we have people whose role is to figure out what users want. Devs tend to design from the perspective of "what features do "I" care about" which isn't always aligned with what users care about.
What's not easy about Signal, though? :c
Signal needs automatic cloud backups so badly. They're encrypted anyways, why not allow it as an option?
I've used it for years now and it's great and I managed to get all my friends to install it. But manual backups are basically impossible for the average user. Also it'd be nice if we could bulk export pictures more easily.
I want to add "federated" to your list, as the only thing that actually matters long term. Signal checks your requirements but has already started to turn user-hostile (e.g. it mandates its own client so you get to have crypto payments whether you like it or not), and, as the single point of control, is an easy target and a single major liability.
Remember the days when WhatsApp was nice to its users? There is no technical guarantee that other centralized systems won't go the same path, which is largely mitigated when the network is made of smaller interoperable actors (i.e. a federation).
I would love to see XMPP be rediscovered and massively adopted as that next gen messenger. I don't trust Matrix to ever be reliable or get past their neverending funding troubles.
Why do people still have faith in this broken system? Companies the size and reach of Meta, do not "fail". Big companies like these have enough control and power to quash or simply buyout future competitors that would usurp them.
There is no system where people vote with their wallets and we can shift control by way of consumer revenue alone. That dream died some 100+ years ago when companies grew large enough to overthrow governments (Chiquita Banana), shape societies (Walmart & McDonald's) and build monopolies so resilient, they will control us into the next millennium (Google).
If you're all banking on the freedom of economy and capitalism self correcting, man is that a long wait for a train that won't come.
There are many people on the privacy communities that will preach about Telegram. Those are supposedly "privacy conscious" folk. Bro, most people just need a slick looking interface that makes them feel cool. Hating on Meta is also somewhat cool at the moment, and those two reasons are why most people switch.
There is no hope.
Isn't Whatsapp owned by meta?
If so, why do people use it?
Find the change. Be the change.
why do people use it?
because it gained popularity in countries where sending SMS used to cost money at the time, years before Facebook has purchased it, became the main means of communication, and it turns out that moving an entire country's (or even continent's) population away from a messaging app has proven to be difficult.
Ironically, it got popular when it still tried to get users to subscribe to a monthly payment. And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular...
Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.
Whatsapp became popular because it was the only app that ran on everything in 2010, it ran on the newly appeared smartphones as well as on featurephones. Nokia, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, you name it, it was supported.
Also because MMS was/is dogshit and sending photos etc through WhatsApp was much better
Yep. It’s like that here and it sucks ass. Every person and business uses it. I think even the Gemente does in some cases.
People are stupid and don't care. I doubt many people here on lemmy are using them but there is always gonna be some using those mentioned, Instagram, or any of facebooks 'services'.
No. WhatsApp was well established before Facebook got involved.
I despise anything Facebook, Meta. Zuck. But with shitty internet, WhatsApp is the only thing that works. If they put ads, I am gone from it.
As someone in the Netherlands who has to use it and really doesn’t want to, I sure hope this motivates to Dutch to stop using this stupid app as the defacto texting platform.
That's why I'll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.
Sure, it's an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it's also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn't controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).
I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won't be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.
WhatsApp claims to be E2E/not readable by Facebook and to my knowledge, all we have to the contrary is speculation provided you verify the keys on both ends (same as Signal). Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal. I’d still 100% trust Signal over WhatsApp given Facebook’s massive conflict of interest, but SMS has been known-bad and collected by the NSA for a decade now. US telecommunications companies also have a terrible reputation for privacy. The only advantage it has over any other platform is portability between providers but even that falls to the side since you can have multiple messaging apps at once.
They won't. Most people just don't care at all unfortunately :(
"Privacy conscious WhatsApp users" 😂 My sides.
WhatsApp could flip on ads right now, right in the middle of messages and the majority wouldn't switch.
They put ads in I'm switching. People can send me SMS for all I care
Please do it! That would help me convince my reminding friends to move to Signal.
For the people who suggest users just change apps. Imagine I just ban all your current forms of text communication (you can still have e-mail), but only you, your family and friends will keep their ecosystems. Do you care you won't talk to them anymore? Can you convince them to use a new app? Does it affect your life beyond social interactions? Is it worth making your life harder?
Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it's a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn't be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.
I can't speak for everybody obviously but from what I've noticed people around here aren't overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn't really matter, you use what you need. There's nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be a hard switch all at once.
There's no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn't whether it's opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
I will let Moxie answer that: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
The day that happens I can hopefully uninstall this thing already. Most of my friends use it, they're really big here in Europe. Pretty hard to move to another app.
Isnt the EU working on something requiring Whatsapp to open up cross messaging for Signal and co.? If they do, there is no reason to be on wa anymore.
YES PLEASE BRING ADS. It will be one more reason to convince people to get off the platform.
One more program to delete.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
WhatsApp might still deploy ads on the platform alongside the app’s Instagram Stories-like Status feature, company head Will Cathcart recently said in an interview.
As pointed out by TechCrunch, Cathcart stated that WhatsApp ads could show up in different places within the app, including the newer Channels feature and statuses, though no timeline was provided for the change.
In the Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the interviewer asked Cathcart if WhatsApp would continue to be free and without ads.
Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the “messaging experience.” Cathcart also added that Channels could charge people to subscribe, and the owners could promote ads for it within Channels.
The Meta-owned messaging app has looked for ways to plaster ads in the app starting as early as 2018, when the company (then known as Facebook) looked to put ads in the Status feature.
However, in 2020, it seemed there was some internal fear about flipping the switch on ads and how privacy-focused users would react, so the delay continued, but plans for ads in the feature remained on the docket.
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Good bot
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It's trying its best ok
boooooo
Ugh and I just got my dad to use it instead of SMS
(No he will not use Signal)
Can I ask why he wouldn’t use Signal?
Delete your WhatsApp, block your SMS and if he wants to talk with you, he will use Signal.
Maybe he will switch even quicker if you punch him or pull his teeth out.
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