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.
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 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.
This is where I’m at with Discord :/
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.
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. :)
