Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps 🫤
That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn't have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
It didn't have proper encryption back then.
OTR predates all the commercial platforms adopting XMPP, so that's not exactly true.
Just never interact with anyone. Christ, it's not that hard people! (This comment doesn't count.)
i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
Its pretty amazing for voice communication in gaming.
As a messenging app? Meh
Friends don't make friends install chat apps (besides Signal)
Not sure why you were downvoted. I've successfully made most of my friends, and my mom for that matter, talk to me on Signal.
The comment implies Signal is peak chat when it’s flawed & other than maybe onboarding, isn’t superior to alternatives—with the phone number being a pro for onboarding is a con for privacy. It still requires you have an Android or iOS primary device (fueling that duopoly). They don’t want you installing it from a safer space like F-Droid. They still by default send notification metadata to Google & Apple (websocket support exists but drains a fair amount of battery & they refuse to support UnifiedPush). They still ship/use Apple emoji on Android & Linux. It’s still a centralized system you can’t self-host. They still have that missing part of the source code (where I would assume the feds planted something). It still isn’t a good space large chats. And the Electron desktop apps are far too bloated.
Signal is the best, but no way I'm going to be able to get my wife, my friends, my parents and in-laws to use it.
I have 3/7 and I hate it. I wish signal never removed the ability to function as sms
Even if it did, it didn't support rcs
That's because Google is gatekeeping the android API for RCS
Wait, I thought Google wanted Apple to start supporting RCS. So that everyone can talk to each other.
So Google is just...trying to strong arm apple to give up their proprietary protocol for their own?
That's so fucked up.
RCS is an open standard. However, on Android you can only use it with Google chat. So android stops any other apps from using it. Nothing to stop you making your own phone from scratch and adopting it.
It's incredibly stupid, I know.
Wait, do you guys have friends?
Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can't download iChat.
As an iPhone user, iChat is mid. I think it’s only in the Us that it is widely used.
Embrace the beauty of Signal now
Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now
A chat app for every friend and a launcher for every game. We live in a utopia.
Remember E-Mail, everyone?
A lot of people around me are genuinely confused when your email is not firstname.lastname@gmail.com, as they mostly just use it for confirming logins. That's how bad the situation is.
Random hot take, I'm at least grateful that my wife and I use an app that none of our friends use. Removes the "oh shit did I send that to the wrong person" panic.
I have a friend that will only chat with me on Instagram. I have his number, but he will never respond to text. He only engages in insta, it’s mildly infuriating.
if you won't talk to me except through insta then you're not worth being friends with just fucking text me like a normal ass human.
Literally me.. I've 5/7 of these installed and even have Threema in addition. I don't need more than one Meta Inc product in my life though
I really miss how windows phone allowed other chat services to plug in to it, so that you could have a single chat app for all your contacts, but open the individual apps for advanced features.
And if you have two phone numbers which you want to use for WhatsApp then you need to clone the damn app because they can't even make such basic functionality
After posting I realized an exported PNG is the same size and looks much better. Enjoy.
Somebody please tell me what's wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there's no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn't understand the difference.
SMS doesn't handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of "texting" but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don't really fix much.
It's unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one's phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
what’s wrong with just texting
If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that's a problem. You'd be sending international texts all day every day.
Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won't find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It's because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can't be able to modify that firmware.
I remember when WebOS had unified messaging. Those were the days. đź‘´
