Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger | Hacker News Reader

Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger

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568 pointslxm496 comments

This is kind of convenient; it gives me one more excuse not to use facebook. A few days ago I got the usual notification email that somebody had sent me a message on FB. Clicking is a low barrier so I clicked, curiously. Then I instead got the "No, now you have to install Messenger app" screen. That was enough of a barrier that I said "oh forget it, who cares, anybody who knows me would know better than to send me an FB message anyway, if it matters they'll get in touch via a 'real' communications medium like email, text, or phone"

So sending me an FB message is now a black hole and I'm fine with that. FB's decision just pushed me and all other similar users (users that already are on the fringes of FB usage, using it only rarely) even further away.

I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or good thing for them, since honestly I don't know what FB could do alternately to win back people in my "barely use FB" demographic, and from comments here it does seem like people who actually use FB regularly did not share my reaction ("screw it then") and instead felt forced to install the app and move on with their lives.

The counterpoint is that I know heavy FB users (myself included) who have opted to just install Messenger on their phones, essentially being able to get rid of FB on the phone, to limit distractions but keep the nice communication

While I kinda get removing it from the mobile app, I don't really know what the rationale is for getting rid of mobile web chat though. It's not like it's disappearing from the desktop web app anytime soon, right?

right?

The rationale that Facebook is using is chat isn't chat anymore, chat is a platform. You have Line/QQ/WeChat to thank for that. Cut the edges to funnel into the "core", and soup it up with platform features to compete with China.

Personally I'm not convinced that "Westerners" are going to get on board with Chinese-style all-in-one chat apps. I'm doubly unconvinced that Facebook will pull it off.

As a westerner, WeChat was one of the coolest apps I encountered living in China.

That said, we should probably consider all of these platforms harmful. I've migrated (and been pressuring my connections to migrate) to Telegram.org

But Telegram is still based on another proprietary, centralized server. I don't see how this solves anyone's problems.

> just install Messenger...to limit distractions

Interesting. I have been much happier since killing the Fb app'a notification and badge permissions.

> While I kinda get removing it from the mobile app, I don't really know what the rationale is for getting rid of mobile web chat though. It's not like it's disappearing from the desktop web app anytime soon, right?

I'm guessing that within the next one year or so, Facebook will force people to move to official apps even on desktop systems (like Windows and OS X), closing browser based access completely. That would give Facebook more control on tracking, ads, etc.

so you never ever use FB on the desktop ? You can still read messages there. I have quite a lot of international friends on FB of whom i don't have a phone number but use Messenger to communicate. Of course, i could try to find out their skype/email but the endresult would be the same, just more hassle to get there. With WhatsApp and Messenger i can pretty much reach anyone i know right now, but i could remove the regular FB app from my phone though.

I didn't even know that it still worked on desktop! This shows that although it's not true that I /never/ use FB on the desktop it's very rare. This is because I never go to FB just to check out FB; I go to FB because a notification email piqued my interest. And I do read my emails almost exclusively on the phone.

The trick is to keep only "facebook.com/messages" in your history (or bookmarks if you use that). That way the browser autocomplete from your history and you get directly to the messages.

Just use http://messenger.com then

Wow, sure is ashamed of themselves, hiding their name from the messenger homepage

>know when people have seen your messages

Oh cool, they brought over the thing that made me completely stop using Facebook!

Also https://m.me

I don't want to know a trick. My point was that FB has unwittingly added a "feature" that helps me do something I want, which is minimize FB usage. Think of say, HN's noprocrast option. It would be crazy for FB to introduce such a thing, but that's what they've done for me here! No way am I going to try to disable it!

All of the emails Facebook sends are in a folder called "SpammySaaS," together with all of sales reps trying to cut me sweet deals on their company's CI/CD.

I don't use Facebook at all, though I have an account. Messenger is perfect for me because I only care about the [very rare] chances that someone sends me a message on Facebook. These have always been friends or family that I haven't talked to in a while, actually! And they don't always have my phone or email address...

The simple reason I do all the communication I can on FBM is that I know it won't get lost in some spam filter.

Perhaps a more nuanced reason is that you don't know it got lost in some spam filter. Out of sight, out of mind...

[1] https://consumerist.com/2012/01/04/how-facebooks-message-spa...

[2] http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how-to-check-facebook-spam-emai...

[3] http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/entertainment/news/a42460/anot...

[4] http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-filtered-message-requ...

I came across these articles a while ago and decided to check my filtered messages just out of curiosity. I hardly ever use fb anymore so I didn't expect to find anything. Lo and behold though, there was a two year old message from my best friend from elementary school who I had lost touch with forever ago. Lesson learned: don't trust Facebook with anything important, they'll fuck it up even if it's one of their core features.

It seems to have become even more cumbersome and confusing in the recent times. FB does not indicate that there may be message requests or filtered messages (even from "friends") waiting to be examined. It seems pointless when you see a message very late and wonder how it could even be missed. FB's message system cannot be trusted with the lack of notifications about these.

I'm also in the "Messenger-only" camp aside from college events before I graduated. Messenger is honestly handy and fun but most importantly for me everyone is on it and active. It's simply the best way to reach someone for me.

hopefully you have control over the data Messenger (and every other app) with something like Xprivacy.

There's a cost to using the free Messenger service [1]. They also want to make it into WeChat.

I see it the opposite way. Using Messenge could give you a great way to use facebook without subjecting yourself to the News Feed Giant Tentacled Monster.

Why not use Messenger without Facebook?

My reason not to use Facebook was because it trivializes friendships. With Facebook, I wouldn't have to go out of my way to be "friends" with someone, so the relationship would be less meaningful. But Messenger doesn't share that property --- you have to bother to click on someone's name and you have to bother to think up a good message to send them. That means it's no worse than any other IM client, with the strong advantage that your real-world friends already use it. You get to keep up with them in the way you want to, and they get to keep up with you in the way they want to.

Best of both worlds?

There's a ton of reasons to not use Messenger.

1. The mandatory "seen" indicator

2. All of your messages are beholden to a private company, permanently stored in plaintext

3. They analyze said messages to deliver advertisements. Seriously, one time I mentioned buying a Samsung SSD to my friend in chat, and all of a sudden I got a ton of SSD advertisements on the sidebar. Same thing when I mentioned Rick and Morty.

4. It's Facebook, for crying out loud.

Most of these sound like reasons not to use Facebook in general.

While the seen indicator is a legitimate annoyance, it's been commonplace for some years now. I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have it.

As for the rest of your points, Facebook's money comes from ads. These concerns are not limited to chat, but using Facebook in general. As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

Every part of the service is designed to help them do this, saying that these are reasons to "not use Messenger" is missing the point. The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook. You just get to message friends, plain and simple. The benefit is you're not being enticed into scrolling your news feed, spammed with notifications about upcoming events etc.

Plus, there are rumours they're going to bring e2e encryption in a la Whatsapp, which would pretty much squash points 2 and 3.

You can turn the seen indicators off in iMessage, fwiw.

> As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

This is why Facebook is best used in an incognito-mode browser window.

[This is about desktop browser use]

I use multiple tabs with FB whenever I do have to use it, and private/incognito mode wouldn't work well for that scenario because it would force me to login in every tab. So instead I use normal mode with extensions to block ads, tracking cookies, social features on websites and Facebook Redirection (where clicks are handled by FB to track which site is being visited). This is with a combination of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and a few others. That way, I get to have multiple FB tabs but don't see my profile in the comments section on another site to allow further tracking. Any link I visit from FB isn't exposed to FB either.

> I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have [the seen indicator].

I don't use those either. I stick to texting and iMessage.

> The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook.

You're tied to their ad platform. Whether you view those ads or not are up to you; but you are nonetheless tied to it. They analyze your private conversations with the eventual hope to manipulate you.

It seems unlikely they'd bring the encryption in. I often have several messengers open. My phone, my tablet, my home desktop, my home laptop, my other home laptop, my work desktop, my work laptop. How will encrypting like Whatsapp keep that working? Some how they'll always be tunneling to my phone from all the various machines?

Also, as an alternative, Hangouts stores my chat history in gmail (opt in), so unlike Messenger/Line/Whatsapp I have a history of all my chats on Hangouts which I actually find very useful.

That said, 99% of my friends and family are on FB Messenger

I'm waiting for the next chat service to emulate the 'ytalk' and 'talkd' practice of the 1980s to echo all keystrokes to the other party as they're typed, rather than waiting for the user to press send.

"Instant Messaging" indeed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

There's a nice XMPP extension for that.

Spec: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html Demos: http://www.realjabber.org/

Not that Google (or whoever) are going to implement it now...

Problems of Messenger App (and not Facebook company): 1. Can't log out 2. Can't turn off the 'online' indicator 3. 'Seen' indicator

I'm interested as to why someone like yourself, a likely tech-savvy HN user, the kind of person who notices how their chats effect ad serving, does not block ads on facebook. Care to share?

The ads are also embedded in the News Feed itself, in the form of "friend X likes Y page" and the like. I'd imagine it would require an ad blocker specifically designed for Facebook to block it. Same goes for the sidebar.

I don't use Facebook enough to care; uBlock Origin suits my needs just fine.

The embedded ads in the News Feed can also be blocked by a extension like uBlock Origin. The additional filter is found from ABP, if I recall.

Good to know, thanks.

Adblocking wouldn't address any of the four points that pikachu_is_cool raised.

For point 3, Facebook could still be analyzing the contents of messages.

Yah, I agree. But I'm still surprised that a adblocker/tracker blocker isn't used by that kind of individual.

An adblocker just treats the symptoms. I'd rather just not have the disease :)

>2. All of your messages are beholden to a private company, permanently stored in plaintext

>3. They analyze said messages to deliver advertisements. Seriously, one time I mentioned buying a Samsung SSD to my friend in chat, and all of a sudden I got a ton of SSD advertisements on the sidebar. Same thing when I mentioned Rick and Morty.

These are poor complaints, unless your circle of friends is so insular on the the (justifiably) paranoid side of tech that everyone is running their own mail servers and using GPG day to day.

You appear to have no problem with a company building up a profile of your likes and dislikes, so they can try and sell stuff to you. That's fine. Why expect that of others, though?

Because it is overwhelmingly what they deliver. The very edgiest of the edgy use Telegram 1-2% of the time. Exactly one person in my social network installed Signal and he gave up on it after about 2 days. No one would dream of touching GPG. The .5% of the time an email address does not end in @gmail.com, it is a Google Apps account.

Are your friends all Tor developers or something? I just can't imagine a set of family/friends/acquaintances who actually run their own Postfix and care what a public key is.

I'll accept the existence of an advertising profile (I don't see the ads, anyway) before I'lll cease all communication with everyone in my network, which is what it would take to avoid Facebook (or the exact same problem with a different company).

Am I the only person who is totally fine with just texting people? I mean, given this is HN, maybe all of you people use Android and have no idea how amazing iMessage is.

Regular SMS is among the least secure communication mechanisms available. I trust Facebook a thousand times more than Verizon.

iMessage is nice, but many of the people I converse with regularly aren't in the Apple ecosystem.

I mean, you're not wrong there, but personally I'd rather have my private conversations in the hands of Verizon than Facebook. Facebook actually sees the value in the private conversations and tries to monetize it. Verizon, on the other hand, has bigger fish to fry.

I'd rather give my conversations to a company that sees storing/processing messages as a liability, rather than an asset.

5. Accesses and mines your phone book. (My rolodex is my business and no way FB or LI are getting it direct from me.)

1. This is ubiquitous among chat apps. 2. This is not likely to remain the case for long, among rumors Messenger is adding end-to-end encryption. 3. There is no evidence they analyze messages for ads. Zero. All attempts to prove this have been disproven. 4. This is not an argument.

I was answering the question "Why not use Messenger?"

To answer that question, I opted to list personal reasons why I don't use it; reasons I'm sure are shared by many. Your response is basically telling me my experience and opinions are wrong.

Your "opinion" that Facebook analyzes Messenger text for ads is an unsubstantiated myth, and factually incorrect.

It is not factually incorrect. Sure, nobody could prove it with certainty, but you can't just dismiss it like that.

...Especially when you're trying to convince someone who saw it with their own two eyes.

> you have to bother to think up a good message to send them

Soon you may not have to! https://googleblog.blogspot.sg/2016/05/allo-duo-apps-messagi...

I'm just gonna go ahead and mention [messenger.com](https://www.messenger.com/) for anyone who agrees with you and doesn't know about it. It's essentially the messenger app in the browser, so you can access your Facebook messages without even coming across the news feed, any ads, etc.

All I get is a big ad to install the app from Google Play.

messenger.com is for desktop only. On mobile, the Facebook Messenger app is standalone -- you don't need the Facebook app to use it.

Use “Request Desktop Site” in Chrome, or another app such as Hermit to use Messenger on Android through the browser.

I'd never trust installing their apps on my phone. The Facebook app admittedly listens to the microphone. So Facebook messages will largely become a black hole for me too.

It's inconvenient that they got rid of their XMPP compatible backend so they could lock us into their privacy destroying app ecosystem.

Fortunately, vendor lock-in breeds resentment and dissidents. Hopefully, a better alternative will come from this.

I use Messenger mostly because it's the only app that's actually achieved quorum amongst people who I talk to.

If that weren't true, I wouldn't use Messenger, and if that's not true for you, I can understand not using it.

I don't really understand, however, why folks like you try to make this a morality issue.

I never mentioned morality, what do you mean?

Yeah, you did.

> FB's decision just pushed me and all other similar users (users that already are on the fringes of FB usage, using it only rarely) even further away.

I'm still not seeing it. Where did I mention morality in there? Or rather, I know I didn't -- so where do you see it? Do you think that most people decide whether or not to use a website based on moral reasons, as opposed to more boring practical ones?

So rather than fixing the problems that result in users messaging via the mobile web app instead of the messenger app, they're just going to "solve" the problem by forcing users to use the messenger app? This is why Facebook as a company doesn't have high levels of consumer trust. This will bite them in the future. Once you lose that level of trust it is extremely difficult to gain back.

Well said

I have no qualms using WhatsApp. It is a very efficient and useful app. They should probably merge messenger and WhatsApp (or maybe not lest they end up making WhatsApp bad too)

from what I understand, WhatsApp works in China and Messenger doesn't. So I doubt they'll merge. But it'd be nice if you could message from one to another

WhatsApp would never accept that. Their brand is a ton better than Messenger's is, for good reason.

I hope the bigwigs at FB don't read your comment. Messenger and whatsapp should never be merged. Part of the reason why I'm glad that Messenger is doing so well (I don't use it myself) it's because I believe that gives them less incentive to mess with whatsapp too much. It's very likely that they will fuck it up eventually but the longer it stays usable the better.

I suspect it's less about solving problems and more about breaking out of that web browser sandbox to siphon up more of that juicy, juicy data.

Yep. Thank god for runtime permissions, at least.

Like those controlled in the iOS Privacy Setting page?

Yeah we now finally have them on android too in marshmallow

Apologies, my computer mouse malfunctioned and I downvoted you while swapping between windows, and I felt so bad about doing so I feel compelled to comment :(

And I actually agree with you...

Well, I did not intent to vote that post, but now I upvoted it just to undo your mistake.

He agreed with him so I just upvoted his post to give him back the upvote he meant.

I have always found it surprising that someone may honestly think that upvoting and downvoting can be used to express agreement or disagreement. If you strongly agree or disagree, just reply with a post of your own; up/downvoting is there so you could express your opinion on the quality of the post rather than whether you think that what it is saying is true or false.

Paul Graham, who started HN, is one of those people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 . Generally, HN strongly discourages "me too" or "i agree" type comments. We prefer to just upvote comments in order to keep discussion threads interesting and on-topic.

It's pretty much upvote to agree, downvote if it doesn't contribute.

Of course the next highest child is then always the next most agreed upon counter argument since they should reply instead of downvote, which can make HN feel a bit contrary but full of good discourse

Isn't that the recipe for an echo chamber?

Replying to a comment removes your vote on it, so you've given an extra upvote :)

Heard of messenger.com ?

Facebook blocks Messenger.com for mobile browser user agents; you need to spoof your UA if you want to use it on mobile. (Some of the Facebook app wrappers can do this for you.)

Which ones? Tinfoil doesn't seem to at the moment.

I believe "Metal" does on the Android side, not sure about iOS.

If you spoof the UA, you can also use the main Facebook website on mobile. Messenger.com might be less cluttered though.

Btw: that works with mobile Firefox. (I originally used it instead of chrome, mostly because it supports ad blocking on unrooted devices.)

Interesting, Asana does that too. And I would rather not use their app...

venmo.com does the same thing.

More likely it's about getting more immediate attention from push notifications.

If you only ever use chat in the browser, you only see messages when you actively check it. With the app installed, you get a giant bubble that you can't ignore for every message. FB wants to be the messenger that people respond to immediately.

For me, I actually like the messenger bubble UI, and love that it's not built as a gateway to the massive time sink of the rest of Facebook. But I think it's clear that omnipresence is the goal here, and we have no reason to believe that it won't become a funnel to the rest of Facebook in the future.

Not for much longer

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...

Text messaging is enormous and it is going to get a lot bigger as companies monetize it with service and retail chatbots. The competition is fierce and although Facebook has the best position, it is not written anywhere that it will remain in that position forever. It's crucial to get the experience right, and you do yourself no favors by distributing your user base and developer resources across multiple platforms.

Sadly, yes. I'd (somewhat) happily run the Messenger app if its permissions were saner. What does it really need? Internet, for sure. Storage, ok. Camera and Location are fairly reasonable. Microphone only because it goes along with Camera.

But it also has Identity, Contacts, SMS, Phone, and a host of others. Do not want.

I'm not a FB fanboy or anything, but sometimes it is a good choice to free yourself from legacy tech burden and build for the future. The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this landscape is just not worth it.

Chrome has perfectly acceptable push notification support.

I am an occasional user of Facebook Messenger, and using the mobile website was perfect: I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost (I'll see the messages eventually anyway). But there's no way I'm going to install a separate app for something I use maybe once a week, tops.

If it stops working from the mobile website, then I just wait until I'm back at my computer to read fb messenges.

I'll assume, by Chrome you mean desktop Chrome. This is irrelevant to my comment. I was specifically talking about realtime push notifications via mobile devices. Also remember that your preference is just your preference, many people would want to be able to make sure their messages get seen in realtime. And Facebook probably wants that for their users too. Again, I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm just saying it's not an illogical decision. You are free to complain but it would be stupid for Facebook to keep going this way just so they can support the legacy technology.

Chrome on Android does support real-time push notifications. I know because I was notified of a friend's Facebook post I was mentioned in within 5 seconds of my friend posting it. I don't have Facebook installed on my phone, and he posted it from his phone while my phone was face up on the table between us and we both where surprised at how fast I was notified.

Con confirm. Worked with real time push notifications via Service Workers in Chrome myself.

Please read my other comments on this thread. Basically just because Android supports it doesn't mean it's all good since iOS doesn't. Also the "open web" you think you have on Chrome is not really that open as you think if you think about the entire mobile ecosystem landscape.

Android Chrome supports push notifications, even when the browser is not loaded.

I keep saying this in every comment I made on this thread, but I'm talking about the entire mobile ecosystem. Who cares if Android Chrome supports it, iOS doesn't. Which means it's not a 100% coverage. Just by letting this happen you are providing a low quality service to not just the iOS users but also the Android users, since there will be an assumption that the recipient doesn't always get the message in realtime. If you want to send that kind of messages, there is always email. Messaging apps are built on assumptions that people know the other person receives push immediately.

I call shenanigans for two reasons:

1) you can never assume a recipient ever has their phone on, with them and in a non-silent mode 2) users can disable push notifications for individual apps anyway

For some reason I feel like I have become some sort of FB defender, but I am not. Just to be clear, I am not a fan of FB. I even completely got rid of my FB account a year ago because I got sick of fake interactions on the site and have never looked back. I am happy with communicating with close people just via text and other special purpose communication apps.

That said, the reasons you mention are pretty edge cases. Instead of just hating on it, just stop and think about it for a moment without prejudice. When you email someone you don't expect them to read it immediately, but when you send a text you at least expect them to know they received something, no? (If you say no to this, I really have nothing else to say anymore, you would be just denying the reality) That's what Facebook wants to be. They're competing with SMS, not email.

Mobile web is an edge case, too.

Shenanigans!

Also, SMS is not guaranteed to reach the recipient in any reasonable timeframe.

Also, if they're supporting desktop clients I again call shenanigans on your argument.

Many of the (non-techie) people I know have Whatsapp push notifications disabled, because otherwise there are way too many of them.

Safari doesn't though :/

> I don't care if notifications are delayed or even lost

But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

It is often better to have no feature than a bad feature. I've never used the mobile web messenger, but if it is unreliable, only works in a few browsers, it makes sense to remove the product.

The mobile Facebook website worked fine with messages. You could see whether there were new messages and you could read them and reply to them. You could even chat a bit albeit not as conveniently as on a laptop or a messaging app such as Hangouts or Whatsapp. But it was just enough to keep you connected when needed.

> But I hope you can imagine why a chat team does care if a technology doesn't allow them to send timely and reliable notifications.

Sure, that's why they have the app. But it's not a reason to completely turn off messaging from the website. Heck, they could even turn off chrome notifications completely and the website would still be completely functional.

More likely the chat team couldn't read your contacts through your web browser and decided to do something about it.

Chrome and Firefox currently support push notifications with GCM https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API and this is a standard API other vendors are free to implement

As far as I know it's not supported on iOS. Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook. You think Chrome is open web, but it's not. It's an app built by Google. If Facebook were to depend on Chrome push notification (which by the way doesn't even exist but for the sake of discussion let's say it does hypothetically), it would mean it's depending on Google on both Android and iOS which means when it comes to mobile Facebook MUST go through Google 100% of the time. You may say they can use Firefox, but for the same reason, why would they add one more layer of gatekeeper just to let their users communicate? You need to realize this "open web" concept is not really open anymore when it comes to mobile.

I'm not sure that's true; Facebook are keen users of serviceworkers and the Facebook web app provides push notifications on Chrome in Android using just that mechanism.

Why do people keep saying "Chrome supports push on Android" to criticize my comment which says "iOS chrome doesn't support push"? It feels like talking to a wall almost.

It's a paragraph long post. One sentence accurately says iOS Chrome (which is really Safari outside of Google's control with Chrome UI due to iOS restrictions) doesn't currently support push. The rest talks about it wouldn't make sense for Facebook to implement this (they already did), a rant about this being Google specific technology (it is not), and not being an open standard (it is).

Maybe you should go back and read again.

> Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS

This is what I said. And this applies to rest of the paragraph. Also open standard has absolutely nothing to do with this, and that was exactly my point. You guys think just because it's open standard it's all open and good, but my point was it is not. The reality is Google and Apple are effectively duopoly when it comes to anything push notification related (GCM is the gatekeeper for Android, APNS is the gatekeeper for iOS). So it doesn't matter if a technology is open standard, it wouldn't even matter if it was completely open source. The reality is your push MUST go through either Apple or Google.

> Even if Chrome had push notification on iOS I can't think of any logical reason to build a push notification inside Chrome if I were Facebook

Facebook has already implemented this. It is in use today on mobile web. If Safari on iOS (which powers "Chrome" on iOS) is updated to support the Push API tomorrow it will start working. Facebook has already implemented it.

As for the rest we're not even talking about web at all. Back to your original post:

> The web (html documents fetched via http requests) were not built with mobile devices in mind, especially websockets. In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications which must go through the device vendor (APNS or GCM), and trying to support the legacy tech in this landscape is just not worth it.

"Legacy tech" isn't necessary to support push notifications on web. Yes, Safari on iOS is woefully outdated for now (which again is what powers "Chrome" on iOS). But it is currently supported on Android (across multiple browsers), soon Windows, and it's possible Safari on iOS will add support in the future https://onesignal.com/blog/when-will-web-push-be-supported-i... Facebook is already using this today.

What you're saying is just factually incorrect. It is an open standard https://w3c.github.io/push-api/ currently supported by both Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft has also started implementing it in Edge https://twitter.com/jacobrossi/status/735153689501958144. Additionally, Facebook already uses it today.

Tell me what's factually incorrect about "Chrome doesn't support push on iOS". Want me to spell it out for you? Here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34588506/ios-web-notifica...

I am amazed how many people on this thread are attacking me saying "Android Chrome supports push notification" when I said "Chrome doesn't support push on iOS". Are you even listening to what I say?

Every browser on iOS is just Safari with different UI (by order of Apple). No one else even could implement push notifications into their browser because only Apple has that control.

It's not that we don't hear you, it's that the reason you're in your position is because you're using a locked down platform that's trailing all other vendors in web technologies intentionally.

Yes, the first sentence of your post was accurate. From there on it's completely false.

I'd agree with you if this was a company that actually sheds legacy tech gracefully, but Xcode can't handle our scale.

Yeah, first they threw out xmpp, so I couldn't use my preffered messaging app, then they kill messaging in the web view, forcing me to give up messaging or move to their messaging app, with intrusive permissions. This after they've soundly established that they don't respect users, with how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app.

At least, since they're closing access from alternative sources, they're slowly succeeding in driving me off facebook. At least if I now have to move to an app, I'll pick one that supports end-to-end encryption (which facebook+xmpp+otr did fine, btw, until they killed it).

I wonder how quickly things will turn in the coming decades, as the incumbent network silos continue to screw users on the altar of data mining and ad revenue, and anyone can start a competing product for free (up to ~thousands of users at least, and at that point, maybe you can find a monetization strategy or get investment to keep going until your product becomes another "big thing").

As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over. We now know some things that other protocols were missing: easy serialization, sane hypermedia, sane extensions, sane push, sane presence, sane async and sync modes (mail and im w/server side archiving) end to end encryption, and some form of trust or other way to mitigate spam. I'm guessing it'll be json based with perhaps swappable transport. Probably should be encapsulated in message-level authenticated encryption. And it'll probably be another five years before we see it realized.

Please stop calling it google wave.

It is Apache wave. And nothing is dead if a community wants it to be alive.

Apologies, I remember it as Google Wave - but you are right it has evolved, and Apache Wave captures the idea that it is indeed an open platform. And while I agree that the technology isn't dead, I don't think it (the protocol) is likely to be what ~7 billion people (or how many now has a phone number) will use to communicate across network providers, carriers, device manufactures and content silos. I think it is dead as an alternative in that sense.

I still use XMPP to connect to google talk and converse with people who are using hangouts. I use "Conversations" on Android, which works well and also supports OMEMO (the XMPP version of the encryption behind Signal/Whatsapp/etc). I'm effectively doing the equivalent of your facebook+xmpp+otr setup today, but it's googlechat+xmpp+omemo.

The author of Conversations recently wrote up the state of XMPP in 2016: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html

So, though you may not be using it anymore, XMPP is far from a dead end.

I thought Google had killed off all XMPP access too. Thanks for the heads up. Of course, everyone I communicate with who doesn't just use email and/or sms/phone are on Facebook (and Snapchat) - but few if any use hangouts. But it's nice to know that if I go back to using XMPP, I can at least point people towards hangouts. Until Allo takes over anyway...

[ed: submitted that to hn, as I'm sure many people would be interested in an update on XMPP from someone that actually works with XMPP implementations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837466 ]

The Facebook app on Android actually works fine without any special permissions. If you disable them all via the new methods in Marshmallow, it just continues trucking on. Of course they'll never stop asking for the extra permissions, but its functionality is pretty equivalent to the mobile site even with no intrusive permissions.

Good to know. I've yet gotten around to trying this out (just recently upgraded to a Marshmellow phone), I feared it was install > grant permssions > optionally revoke permissions. And I wasn't ready to try that with an app that came out of fb, given their track record.

Maybe that's an idea for an open source Android demo app - one that requests a certain set of (or all possible) permissions, and then simply displays the status of those permissions (granted/blocked).

The Facebook app is a memory hog though, and was causing UI lag in other apps on my phone. I have very little idea how it was doing that, but when I removed it, the lag stopped.

I uninstalled the Facebook Messenger app about 3 months ago when I saw a news article about how it devoured battery on Android, because I was having battery life problems at the time.

I just removed Messenger in favor of the Facebook Lite app, which can be found on APK mirror sites if Google Play doesn't offer it. There does seem to be a significant improvement in idle battery drain.

> how they mangled addressbooks with an earlier version of the fb app

Oh right, I didn't know they have my whole Android address book before. I recommend you to download the data Facebook has about you (they don't give all, but a fair amount) https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838

I was actually surprised at the sheer amount of my personal life contained in that file.

> As far as I can gather, XMPP is pretty much a dead end at this point, Google Wave is open, but also dead as a spec. So what'll presumably happen, is that eventually someone will find a new, sane, extensible and open protocol, and it will take over.

I really, really would like to see this happen, but if the past decade and a half is any indication, the ones taking over will be newer centralized, ad monetized systems. Most of the non-tech people don't care much about privacy or lock-in. I keep trying very often to explain to people why privacy is important and why platforms like FB/WhatsApp, etc., are not good. It's an uphill battle though, and most people don't get it or feel it's too much of a hassle to change their habits and that of the people in their networks.

True story.

Except native apps aren't the future :/

JavaScript and the DOM certainly aren't.

Sure. In my case that legacy burden is Facebook.

I work for a living and carry a work phone that is managed due to compliance requirements. I could pop on Facebook and check the occasional message. Facebook makes the mobile web experience as user hostile as possible, but it's sort of works. Now I'm stuck, as are about 20,000 of my coworkers.

It's really interesting to me how controversial contrarian opinions to Facebook actions are in this forum. The parent has bounced up and down vote wise quite a bit.

FB is a real lightning rod topic.

" In the mobile era, all messaging is based on push notifications "

Says you. I'm perfectly happy not knowing about my FB messages until I go look for them. I DON'T WANT them pushed to me. If they want to send me something that needs to be read quickly, use email. Or gasp phone/text/whatsapp (I use the latter begrudgingly because whatsapp has pretty much replaced texting in lots of Europe).

"Users were messaging via the web frontend, so we fixed the glitch."

And we were doing it because Facebook was pushing their messenger app, when the normal Facebook app handled it just fine.

They just simply decided one day, oh hey let's redirect the messages page on the Facebook app to a static page saying "download messenger" and not give any access to the messages, including view-access. Even when you get a notification on your phone about a new message.

I actually liked that I could use a messenger app without all the rest of the stuff that I never used. But I think they split it back then because they wanted to have something more similar to whatsapp (which wasn't theirs yet) - They apparently let you use a phone number to log to messenger too.

You can actually view messages on the mobile web app (or you could earlier today, anyway). On my phone, clicking on messages tells me to download messenger. If I ignore that and hit all messages, it nags again, but eventually does it.

FWIW, I discovered this because Messenger would not show me a group chat that I was added to by co-workers (who I'm not friends with on FB).

Edit: just realized you were referring to the app, not the site. My mistake.

I really wish I could fix all bugs at my workplace like that.

It will just work itself out naturally.

If fixing a chat app poses a problem to a billion dollar company, then we have bigger problems to worry about.

What data can yhet get from having messenger as an app rather than a website? They already have my list of contacts, all the messages I've sent, they can store my message as I type it through their website. I just don't understand!

Your GPS location (if you have it turned on), your SMS messages, your call logs, your phone's storage, your camera, your mic... Just read the permissions: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.o...

I've never had a Facebook app on any of my phones and I will never install one.

Worth pointing out: Luckily, my phone came without Facebook apps preinstalled, so I had the choice of seeing what Facebook wants to access. Other people don't even have that chance since it comes preinstalled in most of the cases.

But they have that data through their regular Facebook app (I wonder if that's next).

Also I'm on iOS so I can deny access to Gps/location/camera/mic and there's no way to access my message history.

Thanks for the reply though!

That's exactly why many don't run the official Facebook either. There are third party apps using the web-interface meant to sandbox Facebook so they can't gather all information. Up until now those web-interfaces have also been able to use the chat though. And you can still do that with some quick apps made to work around this block by facebook.

And hopefully there will be more people who refuse to instal another messaging app.

Is there any source to confirm "Facebook as a company doesn't have high levels of consumer trust"? I even find hard to understand what consumer trust means in a precise way.

no.they need their users on messenger because they have big plans for that app. there are already businesses connecting with customers through messenger.

I dislike this change. I specifically only access Facebook on my phone via the web app because (1) it saves significant battery and (2) I absolutely do not want the popup bubbles during the work day from church and other social groups I am connected to on Facebook. Ultimately, all this means is that I will stop accessing Facebook Messenger on my phone all together. I will communicate with the people who matter most over the Signal app or plain old SMS or email.

Protip: www.messenger.com works on computers.

Doesn't seem to work on mobile tho

> Doesn't seem to work on mobile tho

Did you try the Android "Request Desktop Site" checkbox?

Edit: just saw that Zem says that works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11835060

Edit 2: Jeswin says it isn't useable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834996

it's usable for me if you switch to desktop, but still go to m.facebook.com rather than www.facebook.com (easiest way is to go to facebook first and then switch to desktop). i'm guessing that whatever ajax call clicking on the message icon triggers gets a "this is a desktop" token attached to it even if you are visiting the site via m.facebook.com

I can confirm, go to facebook website, request the desktop version (messaging works there too) and go back to m.facebook.com, messages are there.

This is a good work around. However I will not be relying on this. I'll just reduce my use of Messenger (and probably Facebook) all together.

I'm currently not that dependent on Messenger since most people just text or call me anyway. The rest of Facebook I usually avoid anyway as it's in a different wavelength than I am.

I wonder where that leaves the say 10% of users that use a browser because they are on an device that isn't supported by Messenger (obsolete Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Fire, etc).

It's possible they could detect those devices and leave chat active in the web app.

They are redirected to mbasic.facebook.com which still works. Most Android FB wrappers have used that as a workaround for now to still reach Messenger.

Thank you, this is the way to keep accessing messages in the browser. Deleting Messenger app again.

Mob site still works on my blackberry

you can turn off the bubbles...

Tyranny of the defaults goes both ways; If you're software doesn't have sane defaults, I will search for another.

That's a very weak reason not to use the messenger. You're confirming that if you want to create a good app, you should not listen to complaining users.

Judging by your comments you're not going to use the app period. You can just say so instead of creating artificial reasons which don't hold true for you anyways.

Sane defaults are a very good reason to decide to use an app. It's very common to reset user settings back to defaults during a "major" (or just marketing) upgrade of an app.

We may have very different samples but I'd be shocked to see that behavior in any app that I'd consider worth using. That would easily knock a couple stars off of my (mental or otherwise) rating of an app.

That's interesting, because from your comment history you're in favour of user-specified preferences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114154

That's not incompatible with having sane defaults though...

I am.

I use the facebook app quite a bit, and its never used more than a few precent of my battery in the battery stats on Android, and usually significantly less than my mail client(K-9 Mail) so I never understood the meme that the facebook app uses a ton of battery. Just having the screen on is going to use more battery than the facebook app.

"It turned out other Android services including Android system and Android OS showed reduced battery consumption when the Facebook app was uninstalled. Those services act as a buffer for many apps to the outside world when running in the background. So while Facebook didn’t look like it was using that much power, it was actually just being displayed elsewhere in Android’s statistics." From: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/01/uninstall...

The final straw that pushed me to delete the app - thanks! Had already been living 95% free of Facebook by turning off push notifications anyway

YMMV, but on my phone (HTC One M8), Facebook is almost always the top battery user as shown in the Android battery usage report.

And on my old phone (a venerable HTC Desire HD), Facebook's decision to make me install Messenger in addition to the regular app some time ago was the turning point from low latency and good user experience to overall lag in the phone.

I have a Nexus 5 and its never shown up as the top battery user, usually it's the actual phone app or the screen.

Not to mention that Facebook has intentionally changed the email address of contacts in people's phones without asking them [0].

This does not change my mind about banning all Facebook apps from my devices, it just means even less Facebook for me.

[0] http://www.cnet.com/how-to/facebook-changed-your-e-mail-addr...!

That's not what the article says. They changed people's own listed emails on Facebook.com, no indication they changed anything on devices.

> Not to mention that Facebook has intentionally changed the email address of contacts in people's phones without asking them

They changed it on FB, not in people’s phones.

That's not true, the Facebook app was "syncing" local contacts with Facebook, and thus modifying them.

Oh I wasn’t aware of this "syncing" feature; I thought it had a read-only access to your contact, that’s all. Thanks.

I was bitten by a similar problem one of the very first versions of the FB app, and I haven't tried it again. It synced my Google Contacts (what I use as my canonical contacts list) with Facebook, resulting in duplicates and a whole bunch of mess that still isn't completely resolved years later. Now that I'm on Marshmallow, I might risk it, but I'm very hesitant to do so.

This. I installed the FB app a loooong time ago and was perfectly happy with occasionally checking the mobile website.

You have to sign in every single time on mobile web to get to their website, which is pretty much the only reason I use the apps - you stay signed in.

Just an FYI for any Facebook product geniuses who might be reading this thread:

If you're serious about this, you're going to also want to remove any non-FB contact information for users (email, phone number) that might be displayed, because I guarantee you that rather than installing Messenger that's what I'm going to use if you let me.

And really, if you're going to be so blatantly user hostile, it makes sense to really be thorough about it.

Eventually facebook will become so user hostile the network effect will mean that so many people are leaving it'll be like Digg and Myspace all over again. Can we go back to the time when companies tried to please users instead of advertisers?

I bet this was the decision made by the board members for the "share holder value" in attempts to increase earning per share via advertisement. Once the messenger gains enough users, it's obvious that there will be ads on FB messenger

I think we are slowly going back to the time when social networks didn't exist.

The "social network" generation is maturing enough to know better than using social networks, and the new generation considers them lame and apparently prefer more discreet methods of communication and socializing.

FB(the platform), Twitter and the rest, are slowly finding their place as news aggregators and celebrity/corp point of presence.

As for FB, the company, I just hope they keep giving us amazing tools like RocksDB and React.

ie snapchat

You mean like AOL? I haven't seen your vitriol since the last big FB redesign that even my aunt complained about, which was like what, 5 years ago? I even posted something to FB in the last few years, once it was apparent that FB had not done further obvious redesigns, "remember back when we all hated FB and were going to never use it again?" Nobody replied or liked it.

FB is the Great Mall of the Internet, people don't really care if it sucks because it's just a place where people are. Many don't even have a concept of websites sucking.

Has there ever been a time like that?

Sounds like you have a bad case of "back in my day"-itis.

Yup, before they were public.

I'm not a heavy Facebook user, so I may very well be wrong, but I think Facebook is slowly start to be less valuable in some respects.

For instance businesses need to start evaluating if they really require a Facebook presence. The users that can reach you on Facebook are obnoxious, and expects 24/7 feedback. Unless you are a small niche business you're simply not able to build sufficient community around your Facebook page for it to help further your business. For medium and large companies Facebook is just a place for customers to complain and win prices.

As the company I work for has expanded and become less and less niche we seeing decreasing user engagement from our customers on Facebook, unless they can win a price. At this point marketing really should evaluate the continued need for maintaining a Facebook page, it's just becoming a third support channel, but one where peoples expectations are simply to high, in terms of response time.

Honestly, why is companies like Coca Cola or Volvo on Facebook, it make zero sense when you think about it.

The big companies have got a Facebook/Twitter etc presence because their competitors have one. It's almost certainly a pain in the ass for them because as you mention customers will use it as a public platform to beat the company with when they're pissed off.

There was a period about 5 years ago when every company in the world thought they needed to have Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. It was a serious case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as opposed to a genuine business case for social media.

I suspect we're going to see small and medium companies take a view that maintaining a presence on social media is still not generating ROI. As a result they'll consolidate to fewer social media platforms and perhaps at some point none at all.

If SMEs (or SMBs as they're known in the US) take this approach, big companies will slowly follow I'm sure.

Indeed! Though one example of a big company who has (notoriously) zero presence on any social networks would be Apple.

Not quite zero, a couple of months ago they launched a support channel on Twitter. https://twitter.com/AppleSupport

They also have some accounts for specific things, but no general Apple one. The support channel is about the closest to an official overall Apple account. The support channel seems to be pretty decent so far.

> Can we go back to the time when companies tried to please users instead of advertisers?

The last time that happened was when the users were the customers. But users don't want to pay for anything anymore.

Facebook is mostly politics and baby pictures for me, neither of which I care about, with the occasional important relationship announcement that I do care about, which is why I come back daily.

Now it's going to be much harder to send messages from your friend's phone when your phone dies. Before you could use an incognito tab, and now you have to log out of the Messenger app entirely and log in as another user.

Thank you for bringing up this point - I've often thought about it before, but I didn't immediately think of the connection here. Just another reason why these kinds of changes are a bad idea. It might not be that often that you're without your device (battery died, stolen, forgotten), but when that happens not having a great fallback is really annoying. This goes for all kinds of apps and services, not just fb messaging.

It doesn't seem like you can even log out anymore inside the iOS Messenger app. My wife was without her phone a few weeks ago and needed to message someone via FB.

I could not find the log out button in iOS Messenger, and the only way to do that seems to be logging in to fb.com and hitting a button there which will deactivate your phone session.

Use messenger.com

Facebook's forced migration of their users from basic, functional chat is, in my opinion, more frustrating than any single decision they've made to date (perhaps second to platform risk materializing to those businesses built on top of them).

I once had a (protracted) debate with one of their earliest product designers who defended the decision unconditionally. His arguments were—more or less—"it's better for the user". If instead it was simply "it's going to improve our bottom line" I'd not have given much of a second thought. It's just changes like this that they attempt to spin as positive to their users that drive me crazy.

ETA: found the convo from August 2014 and pasted below. Note this is when they first disabled within the app (and you could start the download to trick it into letting you continue).

> Me: Jared, i get that they want to encourage adoption of the standalone app -- probably for some business purpose, now that they're publicly traded -- but why cripple existing functionality just to obtain that goal? make it annoying so that you have to dismiss the "upgrade" comment .. fine. the only reason i can see is profit, which is fine/just own it, but people are masquerading this as a good product decision for users which i disagree with (obviously).

> Jared: A force is rarely a good product decision. That engenders distrust, and certainly they did not predict the frustration that would occur.

I whole heartedly believe the standalone application is better.

I believe Facebook took a calculated risk, but not a disingenuous one, and not one targeted at making money, one of the form of 'you won't know how to fly unless I push you out of the nest and then, woah, how much you'll thank me' and their convictions, which were backed by engagement data, were unable to actually test the event of "forcing the change". The reaons I belive they took the risk were to minimize ongoing development of a duplicative codebase and achieve engineering focus.

Now, with similar information to Facebook, I ask myself what would I do - would I recall the change with a more transitional approach (e.g. 60 days until install)? Or your friend sent you a sticker / selfie / audio file, to view use the new messenger app? It's a tough question and I pose it back to you, what would you do?

They only put that spin on it because it works. If they didn't do it, they'd seriously hurt for it in the press and in the court of public opinion. Every company does it. Until people savvy up, they're getting exactly what they deserve.

Just because people are dumb about something doesn't mean they deserve to be taken advantage of. We're all dumb about one thing or another.

"better for the user" does not mean "better for EVERY user". A product team has to prioritize. I hate the permissions demanded by messenger, but for me it is nicer to use than the mobile site.

I'm curious what people prefer about the web chat version?

I don't use the apps of some things because the web versions ended up being faster (plus less space on the phone). In my case Messenger ended up being one of the few apps that I opted for ( chat bebles on Android are amazing UI) but...

The web version has no obnoxious notifications (yeah I know you can block them), but the big reason for me is that it's unable to access your contact list, text messages, photo gallery, camera, microphone and GPS. I don't want to share that information with Facebook/5 Eyes.

I stopped using the FB App back in 2014 when the upgrade required a whole heap of additional permissions - the ones you mention. It then forced the update along with separating out the Messenger app.

The mobile web version gave me everything that I needed when using FB - checking some occasional updates, messages and people posting baby pics. Nothing that requires a separate app, and nothing that requires an app, esp since you need to be connected to the internet to see anything. I really don't see (from my perspective) the point of any FB app.

The mobile view was awesome for me. This move blows. Since the messaging is still available on the desktop browser version, this literally means zero extra development time.

FU FB.

I have nothing against the Messenger app per se, but my phone's storage space and RAM is limited. I can't have all the apps installed I would like, and often find myself having to uninstall the apps that I use less frequently, even if I do use them sometimes (part of the problem could be solved by rooting the phone, but I'm lazy). So Facebook forcing me to install a new app (in my case back in 2014, as I don't really like the mobile web version) felt like a big FU from them, especially taking into account that their primary app is already a memory and battery hog (the most resource-consuming app in my phone).

"the user" can be such an abstract nonsense term. Collectivizing the individual desires of a multitude of users into some imaginary entity.

If FB's claim that the standalone app is "it's better for the user" is true, then there should be no need to disable the previous functionality, since users would naturally have flocked to it as FB has been gently nudging them.

So maybe the standalone app is actually NOT better for the user. :)

This is hostile as fuck. Just clicking on the Messages icon on the mobile website launches Google Play Store.

lol

Use this app to "intercept" https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.surrel.messe...

The amount of stupid hacks I have to go through to make Android usable is making me consider trying out iPhone.

While I agree in general and prefer iOS, in this particular case that's a bit of an odd statement. On iOS you couldn't fix this behavior at all - the "stupid hack" won't exist.

That's why Android is winning. The easy things are easy and the hard things are possible.

I don't get why launching play store from browser is even possible.

Did anyone really think that would be used for a good purpose, instead of just rampantly abused?

yes, to add a link to an app from a webpage.

I'm talking about web pages that instantly open the play store with no possibility of user intervention.

I know every time a post about Facebook makes it to the front page here people say they don't use Facebook anymore but as a heavy Facebook user I am so fucking glad I blocked all Facebook domains last week. I feel liberated! This move would have quite ecked me but nope! Fuck you Facebook.

Congratulations! I've tried that before, but have relapsed after a few months.

This announcement coming on the same day as the post about Facebook not using the microphone in the app seems strange to me.

I don't want any Facebook apps on my phone due to privacy and tracking reasons, and so I used the web view (with an app wrapper like Tinfoil with location disabled), now I won't be able to send messages any longer.

Guess I won't be using Messenger any longer.

You can disable microphone access for Messenger app. I disable everything and only enable them when needed.

I assume you must be on Android 6.0? Some (most) of us are still on older phones without that functionality.

Ah you're right. I'm on iOS.

Exactly. Facebook Messenger on Android is basically malware.

I have my doubts about it on iOS but at least the app permissions work properly there.

Folio and Swipe for Facebook use mbasic.facebook.com and are being actively worked on.

It's a loosing game to use "open" web solutions to provide a third party application to these silos. Twitter already killed themselves this way (they're just too big to die quickly), and I think facebook will too.

Facebook as "facebook" is useful and fun, and a way to connect with people and share stuff. Facebook as "messenger" is phone service. It's infrastructure that's part of your life. It's part of direct human contact. It's way too risky to trust to an entity like Facebook (or Google).

If these companies had "invented" email, we'd been set back decades. Just look at how badly MS manages to preform as a netcitizen with Exchange and Outlook (for no good technical reason). Without the network effect and competition that the open email standards push, we'd all be faxing print-outs between hobbled messaging silos.

I mean, we're still using SMS. SMS! Because the big boys couldn't agree to just have user@facebook talk to user@outlook and user@google or user@apple in a sane way! Both FB and Google even had XMPP going for a while, but didn't even federate with each other. It's as if Gmail suddenly stopped accepting external mail (not that their magic black holing isn't annoying enough to work around as it is).

I agree completely with you on this matter and this change will probably bring me back to using SMS and email more.

I really hope RCS will catch on in the future, but there are extra obstacles in addition of all these competing corporate silos of this happening - carriers. Depressing.

RCS? Would that be: http://www.richcommunicationsuite.com/ ?

Yup. I wonder what Google could do in this space.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3045125/mobile-apps/goo...

As far as I can gather from Google.io, build another silo with RCS technology?

So much complaining. The web app version is crap, of course they want to move people over to the app. Why waste resources on an inferior web version when they can focus their attention on the very successful mobile app. Its just good business sense and seeing that 99.9999999999% of Facebook users already have Messenger installed, its a non issue.

> Why waste resources on an inferior web version when they can focus their attention on the very successful mobile app.

Perhaps because the web version is not limited to the proprietary runtime of a single operating system.

I would think most phones support a messenger app. Except if you have a really old or bare phone, but then it might not even support internet?

There are many devices that are not smartphones.

Yes, most devices support the abstract concept of a messenger app, but they each have their own runtimes and APIs that the app must be written for. Writing a web version supports a huge number of clients in a single pass.

Seriously, I am surprised by how out of touch most people on HN are. I'm 23 and everyone I know uses this app, and it's pretty good. One of the main reasons people use it is that you can type in the name of anyone you've ever met and start talking to them instantly. The idea that people are going to stop using Facebook because they no longer support messaging on the mobile web is laughable any place but HN. Any serious FB messaging user knows the app is much better than the mobile web client, which nobody uses.

I wonder if they will just make http://messenger.com more mobile friendly. It's all I use on my laptop.

Facebook once changed all e-mail addresses to @facebook.com

Facebook can sync with your contacts and make a huge jumbled mess

Facebook app drains battery

Facebook app demands elevated privileges that it shouldn't need

Facebook may or may not be listening to your microphone

The web app version has a whole lot of features that the installed app doesn't:

* It takes up zero phone memory. Yes, this is still an issue on really cheap Android phones. [0]

* It takes up zero phone resources, unlike the Facebook app, which is known for slowing down your entire phone. [1]

* The messenger app wants to send me notifications about stupid things and collect personal data using its over-broad permissions. I don't trust Facebook, and I'm not a tinfoil hat type.

* I don't want another chat ecosystem in my life, but if someone does message me on Facebook, I'd like to be able to see it on my phone without having to install an idiotic, resource-sapping, spyware app.

I really, really don't want a "good" Facebook chat solution. People want to chat with me, they can use Skype, Google Hangouts, or Slack. Or just send me an email and we can talk on the phone.

[0] http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_core_prime-6716.php

[1] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/207468

Takes up zero memory and resources, that must be some magical web app. Notifications, they can be turned off. Messenger is not a just another chat ecosystem, it is THE chat ecosystem. The messenger app is not resource intensive, it works fine. What makes you think Google, Microsoft and the Slack teams intentions are more "pure" than Facebook? Facebook is not spying on you, as much as you like to think your special, no one cares what you, yourself do.

>Takes up zero memory and resources, that must be some magical web app.

Sarcasm much?

If I'm not using it, it's using no resources. When I'm using it, then duh, it uses transient resources in Chrome, but when I close the tab, it's back to zero. If I end up using it once every two months, the amortized resource usage is probably 0.1% of an app that needs to receive push notifications.

>Messenger is not a just another chat ecosystem, it is THE chat ecosystem.

Shill much? I just tried to check to see how many people had even tried to contact me in the last year on Messenger, and it looks like I've received about 5 messages in 12 months. But it's hard to tell, because the web app keeps crashing/locking up. No other chat ecosystem I'm connected to behaves that poorly.

If you're using it with all your friends, have a blast. Just don't expect me to respond quickly if you message me; email on my secondary email account would be faster. When I checked just now I found a message that I hadn't noticed and that had sat, unanswered, for 9 months. Not the best way to get a hold of me.

>What makes you think Google, Microsoft and the Slack teams intentions are more "pure" than Facebook?

Nothing. But Hangouts is on my (Android) phone and in my life anyway. Skype is what business contacts seem to always want to use; I swear it has a 99.9% market penetration for companies that do remote work or hire remote workers. Skype also has awesome Skype-to-phone calling, including 3-way calls, that works great with my high quality microphone and speakers, so I can talk hands free and everyone can understand me well. And Slack is ideal for group and work-team hangouts.

Why would I buy into another ecosystem? Just so that I can install yet another app on my phone and on my desktop? I am very reachable by email. If you know my name, you can likely find a contact email for me within 15 minutes. If someone doesn't have my email address and doesn't care enough to put in 2-15 minutes of "research" to find it, I'm not sure if I care whether they can easily contact me. And if they must use Messenger, well, I'm sure I'll see their message eventually.

>as much as you like to think your special, no one cares what you, yourself do.

I'll just leave these here:

http://www.geek.com/news/facebook-like-button-tracks-you-eve...

http://www.ted.com/talks/alessandro_acquisti_why_privacy_mat...

https://www.teachprivacy.com/10-reasons-privacy-matters/

https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matter...

Many of these focus on government access to information, but many times companies have just handed over anything the government has asked for without a fight. Facebook absolutely is watching me along with billions of other people. No, no one at Facebook cares, but they're compiling a huge dossier on practically everyone on the planet. So is Google, but I believe that Google at least tries to Do No Harm. And I don't use Gmail as my primary mail service, either -- I also use Duck Duck Go for most of my searches.

I just think it's not healthy for any one company to have too much information about everyone. Makes an oppressive government's job too easy, if one should arise coughTrumpcough.

Easy on the 9s there buddy, that's one in a trillion.

You're right, more for dramatic effect.

> At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business.

Hah, if only it were that easy. When viewing messages in Chrome for Android, I get redirected to Messenger on the Play Store when I close the overlay. Then the Play Store opens again when I tap on a conversation.

Screw you, Facebook.

requesting the desktop site still works in chrome for android

And God forbid you use different 'people' profiles on your computer - all of a sudden you're getting 5 push notifications instead of 1

User-hostile moves like this fill me with deep, deep frustration.

Which is why they started doing them only after they have achieved world domination. Where are you going to go, myspace? Google+?

To quote Mel Brooks' brilliant "History of the World, Part I" - "It's good to be the king".

More than 50% of my time is spent chatting in a specific small group of friends. We used Whatsapp before (when they didn’t have web access). Before switching to Facebook I tried convincing them to try Slack but alas that option lost out. Too bad, because I think Slack is a really good platform.

What was the reason to drop whatsapp? And why is slack better than facebook?

If you don't want to trust slack of facebook, rocket.chat is shaping up nicely as a self-hostable solution.

I only use facebook over the browser when using my phone. The facebook applications request an appalling number of permissions... never mind the general intrusiveness and battery hogging.

Screw you Facebook.

Android 6 fixes this excessive need for permissions by mobile apps. You only grant permission at runtime and can withdraw it at anytime.

As far as I know, it's still tricky to install an app, then revoke all permissions before the app can possibly run? It would be different if no apps got any permissions by default, and they all had to "prompt on first use" - but that's not how it works, or is it?

That's how it works for apps targeting API 23 (Marshmallow).

Right, but the fb app targets much older APIs? And/or how would you know before installing?

I think it asks you when you install the app only if it targets an older API. Not certain though.

When an app installs it has zero permissions. When the app needs privileged access like microphone access a system notification pops up saying "To record a voice message allow AppX microphone access". You can choose to grant the permission or ignore it.

This is a problem with Android, not Facebook. iOS asks for permissions "on-demand", not when the app is installed. And everything can be denied and you can still use the app.

New Android apps do that too. Unfortunately older apps ask for all permissions from the start, but I assume they will deprecate that eventually.

If fb can't support basic browser based text chat they have a major lack of talent. If it's costing them much to support they have serious financial problems.

I don't think that either is true so I guess they just want to sniff around my phone. Sorry fb, not today.

Interestingly, it lets me use the mobile webapp messaging without asking me to do anything. Because the OS I'm on has no Messenger app, and it probably will never have one.

So if you spoof your UA string, it may stop bugging you and let you use messenger as usual.

Parent is almost, but not quite, entirely useless.

Would you mind sharing with the class what that particular UA is?

Firefox on Firefox OS

Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:47.0) Gecko/47.0 Firefox/47.0

I don't think its useless. Pretty sure Facebook didn't special case Firefox OS, they special cased android/ios. A random UA string (anything that doesn't say android) would be enough.

I'm on a blackberry passport and have also not seen this change (yet). I'll be proactively moving away from facebook as a communication / messenger as they'll more than likely close these loose ends.

I saw this change last night. I will never, EVER install FB Messenger because I don't want facebook to have access to my contact list. Period. This is the worst move the company has made since Beacon and I am at a loss for words to think of how they are justifying forcing people to use an app they clearly don't want to use.

Try Mbasic.facebook.com instead. I also use the browser for Facebook, and have now switched to mbasic instead. It's great.

I have a FB account but rarely login to it. I've never installed the app on my iPhone because I don't want notifications and generally find FB distasteful.

If there was a higher class crowd on FB I would probably use it more but for me it ended up being a bunch of people from my hometown / high school who are angry, usually at other ethnic groups and don't seem wildly successful in their own right.

If I do want to login, I just wait until I'm at a computer. The standalone Messenger app is horrible for permissions and should be avoided at all costs. If you can muster the strength to delete FB, even better. I'm able to very easily not feel tempted to login to that cesspool so I haven't needed to delete mine.

You could just de-friend them.

...or unfollow them.

Most of the time, if someone complains about "stupid discussions/content" or anything alike, I feel that facebook just isn't used in its full potential.

I unfollowed/unfriended/blocked all the connections to people who produce content which isn't enriching my browsing experience. As a result I follow around 10% of my facebook friends, which is a set of about 200 connections with (mostly) valuable content.

I would end up with about 10% or less like you said. I figured if I'm going to start deleting people I'll just delete FB wholesale. Just helps me get spied on anyway.

i refuse to install the mobile app because there is no way to stop people from calling you on messenger. There is no way to turn it off or have some kind of do not disturb. If someone wants to mess with you they can just keep calling you and your only choice is to block them and remove them from your friends list

>> "If someone wants to mess with you they can just keep calling you and your only choice is to block them and remove them from your friends list"

This seems like either a made up scenario or you have weird friends. Who would keep calling someone to 'mess with them'???

A classmate when you're holding a presentation? It sounds entirely plausible to me.

Why would you have your phone on while giving a presentation? Also, it's not a very Messenger specific problem - they could do the same thing with your actual phone number.

Well I usually put my phone to silent during class and especially presentations. The person you commented on mentioned there is no silent mode. Of course you could turn the phone off entirely, but then it takes longer to turn on, and you have to unlock the SIM card again... quite a hassle just to make facebook's apps shut up.

I don't know though, I've never used Facebook Messenger.

If you silence your device it will silence everything on it. No noise, no vibrations, no way for apps to bypass it (iPhone at least, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with Android).

You know people harass others, right? It's not "made up". Come on.

Of course - why are you friends with these people on Facebook then?? The OP mentioned that blocking was not a viable solution which indicates that he wants to keep them as friends on Facebook. If your friends are harassing you get better friends.

I'm not going to claim that my experiences here are the norm because I doubt they are, but the primary impact of Facebook previously splitting Messenger off into a separate app (from the native mobile app) in the circle of people I communicate with on Facebook is that we all (organically, without ever really discussing it) just switched back to using olde timey SMS/MMS for things that would have been Facebook messages.

Not at all a spiteful/angry decision, just more of a "well, if I have to go out to another app to do this shit, I might as well just use this thing that works with all my friends including the increasing number of them that don't ever login to Facebook anymore".

I mean, to be fair, the only thing I use Facebook for is Messenger, and the Messenger app is actually halfway decent. It caches user names and pictures a little too aggressively, and the new trend of "let's add a row of buttons to the text input box, doubling its size to reduce screen space for features that should be optional" is incredibly obnoxious, but overall it's a decent app. It's obviously not designed for the users, but it's better than the Hangouts app.

This isn't to say that removing the web functionality isn't a dick move and fairly user-hostile, but I don't really understand why so many people act like Messenger.app is an affront to god and man.

Permissions on Android, it seems like

Speaking of dark patterns, Google has completely broken Gmail and Google Docs/Drive in incognito mode in Android Chrome. It purposefully loses the cookie and will not function once you switch away to another app and then back to the browser. They are trying hard to force people into using the native apps, or at least staying logged in, for GMail/Inbox and Drive. It's really lame. Instead of being passive-aggressive, they could just put up a message saying that they don't support a specific usage. This is a well known "bug" that has been around in their bug tracker for a while.

Install Chrome Beta, Opera, Opera Beta. Voila, now you have 4 separate cookie jars for different use cases. For staying logged in gmail/fb I use Chrome beta, Chrome stable for normal browsing.

If you're a Linux user, see the `--user-data-dir` option of the `chromium-browser` executable. Whack 'em in `/tmp` for as many pseudo-incognito cookie jars as you like!

As a heavy messenger user, my typical use-cases can entirely be fulfilled with a web-based messenger. However, FB doesn't let people open messenger.com from a mobile browser. And if you request the desktop site, it's virtually unusable on the tiny phone screen. It must have been really hard to make a responsive messenger UI.

This is awful. I refuse to have the Facebook app on my phone, and obviously refuse to have messenger too. The last thing I want is more of my xommunications and data owned by that company. Fortunately I can do perfectly well without reading my messages on the web browser. I hope this decision marks an inflexion point for the company

I love how every HN thread about Facebook's scummy forced engagement tactics always turn into Fbook addiction-denail support groups.

Just drop Fbook guys - trust me, you'll be fine without it. If someone really wants to talk to you they'll get your email or phone number through a mutual friend/family member.

I really hate using Facebook in general, and very rarely have to use it for group projects. I'm loathe to even load the website on my phone, so this is an awful update...

I would encourage you to not give them what they want. Just use a computer/laptop when chatting with some project group (that's what I did back when Telegram and Slack didn't exist yet).

Well this means I'm done for good with Facebook. My disabled account will soon be deleted I guess, messenger is just packed with spyware :(

Oh interesting, like what?

I very determinantly refuse to install both the regular FB app and the messenger, even though this is quite inconvenient as I often miss messages or event invites. But they require pretty much EVERY PERMISSION there is on Android, which is ridiciolous, and totally inacceptable to me.

So this change will make it even harder for me to access FB messaging. Buuh.

Are you on a modern Android build? You can now selectively enable permissions, as of Android 6.0.

I can't upgrade to 6.0 yet.

Also, I haven't tried it with FB, but a lot of apps actually fail or don't work properly if you don't give them all of the permissions they require.

I recently uninstalled both apps, and my phone seems to be running much smoother since. If someone needs me they can text. I think it's time to ween off facebook, and sell my stock.

I think it's their second attempt at this. I remember when they were opening dialogs to invite me use Messenger to reply to messages on a page I admin. I switched the browser to desktop user agent, which on a tablet is ok. Eventually they gave up. I'll do the same this time.

https://github.com/gsurrel/MessengerBypasser

Problem solver for Android. Available via fdroid.I use Tinfoil for Facebook and this compliments it nicely.

Why is anyone using Facebook for chat at all? (Real question)

because many of their friends they want to chat with are.

Because a lot of people use it for chat. The network effect is powerful.

Because everyone has it. And it doesn't need a phone number. So it's almost as ubiquitous as SMS, without distributing your phone number. Win-win.

So if its main selling point is being ubiquitous, why the fuck wouldn't they force everyone to the same platform?

I have the opposite question: if its main selling point is being ubiquitous, why the fuck wouldn't they want to maximize the number of ways users can access it so that it stays, you know, ubiquitous?

Yup, because they're idiots and it's moves like this that will allow an upstart to steal all the market.

how often do you want to chat with someone you wouldn't give your phone number to though? if they can call you via messenger anyway, where is the win in them not having your phone number?

It is much easier to block someone on messenger than go through the carrier to get them to block a number.

because it's very well designed. it gets casual asynchronous messaging right in a lot of ways. unlike email, threads are grouped by person rather than by subject line, which makes it a lot lower friction (subject lines are for talking about something; they're a usability drawback when you're primarily talking to someone). unlike sms, you don't have to maintain a person->id mapping yourself, it's done globally and kept constantly up to date by facebook. unlike whatsapp, it's not tied to your phone; you just need to know your username and password to access it from any browser-capable device. and finally, it supports notifications via a variety of mechanisms, and even if you don't enable any of them (i don't), most people who use facebook check it regularly anyway, so you get to see the little "you have new messages" icon each time you go to read your stream.

I hate how when I go to a website it forces me to open it in the app. If I Google a restaurant, and Yelp comes up, opens up in Yelp app....same with Amazon. Seems like you can long press a link to open it in the browser...but it's a very poor user experience.

When I am running low on space on my phone, those apps the the first to get deleted Facebook and Messengae first, of course!. Facebook caches their data and at one point it was at 700mb...with no way to clear the data except for deleting the app and reinstalling.

Well, this will mean even less fb interaction for me.

FB iOS apps were resource pigs and data whores. Neither installed.

Maybe I'll just vnc in to a browser on the home machine when I need to message.

Otherwise, iMessage it is.

I read "FBIOS"

It's incredibly difficult to do end to end encryption well in a mobile browser.

Facebook has hinted they are rolling that out and it will create all kinds of frustration for mobile web users.

You can also use Trillian for FB messages instead of installing the FB app. https://www.trillian.im

Seconded! I use the paid version but the free version supports Facebook messenger just fine. I just got my brother on it yesterday and he already recommended it to everyone fed up with the new change.

I had an ancient account, over a decade I guess, back when I was on AIM, ICQ and MSN, I think? I recently signed back up for just this reason.

So far, so good! I InApp'd a month, but will likely get a year's worth at renewal.

You can just switch over to the desktop version of Facebook and the messaging will work as on a desktop browser. You can also use messenger.com by requesting the desktop version. It sucks but not as much as the intrusive messenger.

The trend is alarming though and just fortifies my perception of Facebook further. They're trying to make their cust..uh, I mean, products, behave the way they want instead of listening to what people want and how they want it. That's a classic bad move from any company. Since this is HN, wasn't success supposed to have a high correlation with "Make something people want" ?

Facebook's leverage is mostly based on their user base. As soon as there's at least one commonly used social network where I can find most of my friends, bye bye Facebook. That is a ridiculously hard problem to solve and Facebook know that. At the same time they're just using more and more of that leverage by trying to force things down on people's throats instead of adding to the pile of reasons why people would want to use Facebook. This makes it imperative that once something else, something even moderately bearable that is not Facebook, becomes available then people will be fleeing in masses.

Yes, enforcing your users. That is how it works. (/sarcasm)

I was a very active facebook user for a long time and never imagined that I could stop using it, having so many of my relationships hosted in there. But honestly it all went so strange. 90% of the FB notifications are spam. The very good inapp chat was replaced by a worse extra app and now they enforce it everywhere. In the end I just deactivated notifications for all of that. Byebye, social network.

I rotally agree. During the last months I monitored myself using FB less and less.

For years I have to used the app or messenger. If needed I only ever access the website. If they take the messaging functionality away I will even use it less. Or leave it all behind.

I guess people will just have a hard time getting a response out of me if they try and contact me via Facebook message. The Messenger app will never touch my phone.

I don't use FB, but my wife does. She is quite unhappy about it. She doesn't want FB to have access to everything (yes, some poor folk like us are not on Android 6 and will not be for a while.).

The other issue is the size of the app. I realize that most people don't have this issue, but on the lower end phones adding another 36mb app means loosing another. And given history that 36mb app is likely to be 80 by the end of the year.

Its funny how every post about FB on HN, brings out users claiming not to use FB and so now they have so much free time now, which they can use to discuss FB :D

Are you sure it's funny?

Simple solution: don't chat on Facebook. Reply via the web interface and tell the other person to send you an email, SMS, or Google Hangouts message.

Simple yes, practical no.

Practical enough for me. The only thing I use Facebook for is to say "Thank you" when folks wish me a happy birthday on my "wall". For literally everything else, the friends and family worth talking to have gotten the message that I'm not reliably reachable on Facebook and therefore should be reached by other means (and if they're worth talking to, they should already have my phone number and/or email address).

It's about drawing a line. I drew that line two years ago, and not once have I looked back or otherwise felt any semblance of regret or frustration from it. Among SMS, email, Telegram, Google+/Hangouts, ordinary phone calls, snail mail, in-person, and the cornucopia of other communications options out there, there's zero reason to put up with Facebook's nonsense.

> The only thing I use Facebook for is to say "Thank you" when folks wish me a happy birthday on my "wall".

You can fix that by removing your birthday from Facebook. I did that one year and it turned out as expected, people only wish you happy birthday on Facebook, because Facebook more or less tells them to.

The other way to solve this is to set your birthday to an incorrect date; that way you don't have to feel bad about not saying thanks.

That's just evil! I like it.

Then why do you even have a facebook account?

I use Facebook (somewhat sparingly) but considered deleting my profile a few years ago, when I wasn't using it at all.

I decided against because it was so useful as an "every once in a while" inbox for people who wouldn't have been able to reach me otherwise: a girl I met at a party, a cousin from Australia who happened to be in town for a couple of days, etc etc. The former would either never find me (depending on how big the party was) and the latter would have to jump through the hoops of chaining phone numbers through our large extended family. Both of those are handily coopted by having an almost-universal directory, with customizable amounts of information displayed, along with photos so you know it's the right profile.

Or you know, you guys could have emailed each other. Everyone still has email and you know what its the one thing on the internet that always works really well.

This is typical trope of the "why I have to be on FB." Download everyones contact and or sync to your address book. When people are in town they text you or email you. Trust me it works. People found each other just fine before FB and they can just find now.

> Or you know, you guys could have emailed each other.

Um, did you actually read my comment? Roughly half ofit was dedicated to the fact that being able to find me by just my name and photo is easier than trying to track down my phone number; I'm not sure how you missed that....

Why do you think it would be any easier to find my email address? If anything, connecting us across my extended family would be a lot harder through finding a bunch of emails than finding a bunch of email addresses. I honestly don't know what reality you're imagining where everybody has the email address of everybody they know.

Because I'm too lazy to delete it. ;)

>For literally everything else, the friends and family worth talking to have gotten the message that I'm not reliably reachable on Facebook

Same thing here, I drew this line about 5 years ago. Now everybody knows that the only reliable means to communicate remotely with me are : Emails/Signal, or regular phone calls/SMS as a fallback.

Only people worth talking to (family and close friends), do the effort of reaching me on my preferred communication channel.

Behaviour like this is why we need efforts like purple-facebook[0]

I wish to be able to host purple-facebook on a server and throw a web UI in front of it. It won't be as complete as messenger, but at least basic chat will work without having to download a sneaky app.

0: https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook

That's not true. You still can access the conversations from a browser on Android.

- press the chat icon

- wait for Google Play to open

- switch back to your browser

- press the "X" on the "Your conversations are moved to Messanger" dialog

- select the person you want to chat with

- wait for Google Play to open again

- switch back to your browser

Proof that it works: http://i.imgur.com/29BoF8V.png

There is an easier way. Before you click on chat, from chrome preferences choose"request desktop site"

Click chat icon. Profit

Both m.facebook.com and mbasic.facebook.com work for me and I see chat, Chrome Beta for Android. Maybe they (for now?) didn't enable it everywhere yet?

From the TechCrunch article: "At the moment, you can just dismiss the notice and go about your business. But this summer the warning will become an impenetrable wall, and your only option will be to download the official Messenger app."

Aaand it's gone.

Now you can't dismiss it at all.

I'm surprised at all the hate coming from everyone. Then again I already use messenger.com never used the mobile web app for chat.

Messenger.com blocks most mobile browsers.

Facebook's "Paper" app has a better UI than the official client, and it still has messaging directly integrated.

It's not available all over the world and is iOS only.

I am not a mobile app junkie, and I count the number of messaging apps on my mobile: imessage, whatsapp, kik. That's already 3, ie two too many. Then I would need to add facebook, telegram, google's latest thing, skype? I mean why not a different messaging app for each contact? Why does facebook thinks I need more messaging apps?

If it's not their messaging app you're using, they're not happy.

The only messaging app I have installed is Telegram. People who can't use that (my cousin still has some old Blackberry, a classmate has no smartphone and my dad has no messaging apps) can use good ol' SMS, and that works fine since it's practically free nowadays. Problem solved.

Mark my words, pop-up advertisement will be served via chat-bots in a year. Hence the push to an application that has a pop-up feature like those head-bubble things.

I've been using Tinfoil for Facebook for a good while now, since my old phone is just incapable of handling their applications. I guess it's time to just delete my profile for good.

I have the Messenger app. When I first installed it, it asked me to do the following:

- Enable Notifications

- Enable access to my Contacts

- Add my phone number to my FB account

I respectfully refused to allow any of this. Every time that I opened the Messenger app, I got a pop-up asking me to enable Notifications. I enabled notifications, then went into my iOS settings and disabled them. This stopped the pop-ups, but now I see a red warning symbol on my Messenger "Me" icon in the lower right which wants me to enable Notifications once and for all. I also see another red icon on the People icon which says that I need to sync my contacts.

I'm disappointed in the direction that Facebook is turning the Messenger app towards. They seem to be desperate for these three options to be enabled.

Did they notice people are uninstalling FB app? :) It's a bit scary to see how they grab vast amounts of our attention. I've heard they aim to make the Messenger a "business" communication app that replaces email. I sincerely hope they will not succeed.

Uh, I pretty much hate the facebook app these days because they're always trying to cram their overly zealous messenger app down my proverbial throught. No facebook, I don't want a bazillion notifications and another massive app on my tiny phone.

Which means I will actively start steering my conversation partners to matrix.org and vector.im

That’d be the end to staying in touch through mobile FB in w3m on an EC2 instance SSH’d into from China.

(Not that it’s that convenient… Gotta say though, impressed with both FB being able to work in w3m, and with w3m being able to handle FB.)

And I couldn't be happier. I discovered Messenger as "FB chat without all the distractions" (and much snappier); and seeing that it gets prioritized (instead of being an alternative way) is, for me, a good thing.

Fine that you are happy with it (though I have moral concerns with Facebook as a whole, if you're happy with it, that's quite alright). However should that mean that everyone has to be happy with installing this app, instead of being given the choice to use the website?

In theory it is great when there are many choices. In practice, companies focus - and it is better when they have a single working product than a few almost-working products.

I don't want to say that everything FB does is fine - but this particular product is OK. Looking other way - would I like to get a working standalone product being integrated in FB, so that I cannot use it without viewing wall. Hell no!

On mobile I use FB app anyway - so maybe it is why I don't feel the pain. (And installed Messenger app quite some time ago.)

I dislike this change, but fortunately - at least so far - it is possible to use Chrome on an Android phone and request the desktop version of any site, and Facebook desktop version still allows using the messaging function in browser.

I'm not going to install Facebook messenger, it east battery and reports my location when I don't want it to. So if they kludge the desktop site so that it doesn't work on Android Chrome, I'll just not use Facebook messaging. Facebook should at least add an auto-reply function to tell anyone who tries to message me that "please send email to xxx instead".

Are they getting rid of messenger.com too?

When I navigate to it on my OS X and iOS platforms, it just pushes me to download the app. Was there ever something different there?

Chrome on Windows 10 shows a full-fledged messenger UI. It's quite nice. It does not redirect to the Windows universal app.

messenger.com on OS X should work fine, I use it all the time there.

Free market ideologues would have you believe that companies have only incentives to improve their products and services, giving customers what they want, so the company can earn more. Competition will ensure this happens, right?

Not in this case. Here we have a company that has incentives to cripple its product and services, taking away from many customers features they clearly use and want, and giving them something else they clearly don't want, so the company can earn more.

Their main product is the Facebook feed. And they seem to give people what they want.

Too bad that what people want is to just turn off their brain.

You forget, Facebook's customers are not its users; they are assets whose access they are selling to their actual customers, ad agencies and marketers. Advertising made up nearly 97% of Facebook's revenue in Q1 2016[0]. Messenger and messaging is something Facebook has not previously monetized, and I would presume this is part of Facebook's plan to monetize messenger by releasing ads on it in Q2 2016[1]. This all makes perfect sense if messaging in the Facebook app is used by few enough of its users that the cost of maintaining and monetizing it would be greater than ad revenue it could generate, which seems reasonable to me. So, in fact, they are only improving their products and services for their paying customers, advertisers. I'm rather confidant that Facebook would not be doing this if its users were its paying customers. [0] http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=967167 [1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/facebook-messenger-ads/

The reason I use the web interface and not the app are following:

- you can't disable notifications - you can't secure your app (aka Pin protection or a password) - huge battery drain as it is constantly connected to the internet.

The web app is easy. You log in and you check your messages. An alternative for android that I have found for Android is called fast Facebook. It shows a web view of the chat and ignores the market:// redirects. Which is already better.

- you can't disable notifications

You absolutely can mute conversations, tap the (i) at the top of each convo, very first menu option should be "Notifications".

With you on everything else.

if i understand you correctly, that's muting conversations on a one-at-a-time basis, which is not the same as being able to globally disable notifications from the app

You can disable those too, click the "Profile" icon (the one with the silhouette) at the main screen, third menu option after user name and phone number is notifications. Globally.

on android at least, you can always globally disable notifications from an app: long press on a notification, tap the little i in a circle that appears, and there should be an "allow notifications" box you can un-check.

To add to the reply for Android, you can do this for iOS too if you use that.

Settings > messenger > notifications > toggle for allow notifications, or to modify them if you prefer.

Yes indeed you can with a max time until your alarm goes of. I want to determine myself how long I disable my notifications.

Well...you have incremental time options, or you can set it to "Until I turn it back on". Only globally has a limit to turn off EVERYTHING for 24 hours. Otherwise, you can disable wholesale the sound and popup notification with no max time. I'm no FB support person, just a heavy user of the App.

OK, I did not know that. Thanks :-)

I found this app meant to fight this block by facebook. https://github.com/gsurrel/MessengerBypasser/blob/HEAD/READM...

I tried it with tinfoil for facebook and it seems to work well.

It also states that what crashes the tinfoil-app is a call to launch Messenger.

I don't want their battery sucking apps on my phone. Occasionally I'd like to see messages people send me. Really really really stupid.

I have a blackberry (BB10 based Q5) as my personal phone. The reasons for this are manyfold, and I migrated from Android. I love my Q5 it does everything I need really well... except for FB and Messenger - there's no native apps. So I am now in the situation of trying to convert my friends to something else for chat, or change my phone.

It will probably be the latter.

(Written via my Blackberry)

I've heard that the reason there are so many "varieties" of products in grocery stores (think varieties of Colgate toothpaste) is that the manufacturers are trying to maximize the shelf space their products take up.

Are Google and Facebook doing the same thing with home screens? Is that why they're smashing their big apps into little ones?

Facebook has peaked... its downhill from here... annoying the users so they find something else small group by small group

This is a nod probably towards the trend that Facebook itself is dying. What is left is Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Didn't they already do this long ago? I thought it was a few years ago that they made me install messenger to use messages. That thing was a little too... cowboy... with all those bubbles splattering all over my screen. I uninstalled Facebook Messenger to save my sanity and haven't conversed via messages for years.

FaceSlim has figured out a way to bypass this restriction:

http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/03/facebook-is-disabling-messa...

It's already nigh impenetrable. Each tap or action within Messages on the mobile site brings up that modal and also switches your active app to the Google Play (or I imagine the Apple App Store for iPhones) store page of Messenger.

Really, really, really annoying.

So I've just started requesting the desktop site on my mobile browser.

Might because of this new "Deep learning text" ? I know this will be mainly integrated into Messenger.

Help me understand - why is this so bad?

Some people don't want any Facebook software in their phones for legitimate privacy reasons.

Emphasis on legitimate, Facebook is giving Google a run for their money when it comes to privacy invasion.

Not to mention that Facebook's apps are notorious for their battery usage (probably because of their egregious privacy-violating "features", but whatever).

What is it that Messenger the app can access that Messenger via Facebook cannot, for people who take their privacy seriously?

Privacy concerned users can use wrappers around the Facebook website, such as the open source "Tinfoil for Facebook" or "Face Slim" android apps, then Facebook cannot access certain things (depending on your configuration). If have to use a proprietary facebook app, then likely cannot achieve the same degree of privacy protections.

I'm sorry. I still don't understand what specific information Facebook can gather from them using their app that they can't from the browser. When I look in my phone settings for the Messenger app, I can switch off it's ability to look at locations, photos, etc.

Tinfoil appears to be an app to specifically work around the fact that browsers can leak more information than the app would.

well the facebook app is always on, even in background. It is probably reading every keystroke and touch action, and even every pause between actions. But when accessing the basic browser site inside tinfoil, they can only get http actions you actually transmit, such as likes, login times, page loads, etc.

You think apps can read the text you type in to other apps without your permission?

Of course not other apps. I'm talking about the facebook app itself. When you start typing text, it is presumably reading the delay between every keystroke and all your deletes. However, on the non-js html site, it only can get the text after you submit.

I don't put any Facebook software on my phone, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger. The reason they are forcing people to use Facebook Messenger is to force people who only use the website to install software that tracks you.

There are no good chat platforms that have anywhere near the network effect of Facebook. There are a couple of silos that are ok, like Hangouts and presumably iMessage. People don't generally use XMPP. Sending a text message can be a bit intrusive, a facebook message is more like an email in that I don't expect to wake someone in a different timezone if I send one - but it's unlike an email in that I can be fairly certain (a certain subset) of people will get it. And might check it/reply when it's convenient for them to talk. An asynchronous signalling of a conversation, if you will.

So when choosing between a lot of bad and propietary options for chat, fb messaging was best.

Except you can't and shouldn't trust FB to make client software; they take to many permissions, they might mess with your (contact) data - the apps have an inflated sense of urgency (hangouts is guilty of this too). And they are resource hungry.

And as fb chat is generally (for me) somewhat asynchronous, the web client was perfect: I could see if there were any new messages, and if there were any new notifications at the same time.

Moving this to one platform, for me, kills the product. At least on mobile. And if I can't use it on mobile, I'll probably slowly stop using it altogether.

For me it's mainly bad, because I see no clear alternative. Facebook was the one silo I could reliably reach most acquaintances. I'm not on snapchat, but even if I was, there are people I might occasionally reach out to on fb, that I probably won't contact/be contacted by on snapchat. Google social efforts is a joke, and many people don't really use email for personal communication.

The first part of your argument makes perfect sense.

The rest less so. Looking at my iOS phone's options, I believe I can disable access to pretty much any data the browser doesn't have, including notifications. What am I missing?

Probably that I have an Android phone :-)

[ed: About notifications - I think the point there is more a cultural point. I don't want to send you a fb message at 3 am your time if I think it might wake you up.]

Honestly... That's the only part of FB I use. For a while now I've had only the Messenger app installed and just a FB shortcut to the webpage on my iPhone.

I only check FB about once a week and use Messenger daily with friends that live or travel internationally.

I had to uninstall the Facebook Android app and the Messenger app a while ago. After an update, just having the apps on my phone was causing it to keep stuttering. And if I actually opened the Facebook app my phone would completely lock up requiring a reboot.

they did this before and rolled it back, if i'm remembering things correctly.

The Facebook community is, by and large, a positive for the world.

The Facebook platform is one giant, dark pattern.

Here's hoping the community wins.

Why we need to continue fostering alternatives. Diversity and competition, to keep things a little more honest.

Why do they want two apps? I have never used messaging in FB after they started forcing me over to Messenger in a nasty way (I read the messages on the Web platform when I happen to log in there, which is seldom).

This is kind of a non issue... You can just use messenger.com, no need to download an app. I'm probably biased though because messaging is the only thing I really use Facebook for, and event tracking.

Most mobile browsers are blocked by messenger.com though.

What is it with companies? Why force these unnecessary transitions. What kind of possible revenue stream will the dedicated Messenger app provide that just using the messenger on the web app not provide?

Anyone have a more informed opinion on whether this is in some way due to their efforts with bots?

I'm guessing a native app enables a lot more on that front in some regard than web, or perhaps provides a moat.

I've been hit with this and rather than give in to Facebook wanting me to install their messenger, will be looking into a third party app like Trillian, etc to do my chats.

This seems to be the behavior last time I used the app (about 3-4 months ago).

Honestly, I just use Messenger without Facebok, since the IM part is the only thing I'd need on the road.

If only there was a way to disable fb messages altogether, otherwise people who will be sending me messages there, will be distracted, and I will be the one to blame...

so... will it still work on facebook lite? For those of us who avoid the official apps for battery/data consumption, FB Lite is an available middle ground...

It looks like for the moment, yes. FB Lite isn't offered in Google Play for users in wealthy countries, but there are mirrors for the APK.

So glad they're doing this. FB messenger is just about my favourite messenger - it beats the pants off iMessage and isn't as annoying as WhatsApp (the UX around starting a conversation with a new person in whatsapp is super shit).

It was really annoying that there's some holdouts where voice chat doesn't work (has anyone noticed how much better the quality of voice chat over FB messenger or iMessage is, vs phone calls). Or where they didn't get my messages because they didn't have notificartions set up for FB messenger.

Glad they're fixing this (and I might be the only person on HN who is :))

So what's stopping you from simply using the native FB messenger. What's the point in forcing everyone install the native app?

Yet they killed the FB messenger for PC. Makes no sense. Now if I'm at my PC I need to log in to their website to chat since I only use this feature of FB.

https://m.facebook.com/messages/ still works.

I can't install Messenger on my MotoG3. It slows it the eff down to a crawl and drains the battery, even when I'm not using it.

messenger.com has a functional messenger, that they are updating regularly and it scales very will to different screen sizes. Unfortunately they won't allow you to use it if they think your device is a phone, just pointing you towards the native application.

I don't know what this obsession with native applications is. A lot of the time I prefer to just use your website.

"Your conversations are moving to Messenger"

No problem. It's not there's conversations with dead people in there or anything.

The conversations are not lost; they're stored on Facebook's servers.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the move, but this isn't one.

They are moved to where I no longer have access to them.

I'm sure that's not true. Unless you have forgotten your password or something.

They remain accessible, same as always; The only thing that changes is the application you are using to look at the chat history.

Not everyone has access to that application.

The desktop site still exists. It can even be viewed via mobile, for the sufficiently desperate.

What was the alternative before Messenger? SMS?

And yesterday Pinterest forced me to install their app just to view a picture.

Native apps are really becoming dominant over mobile web apps.

That will be why Tinfoil has suddenly started crashing when I try to view my messages.

All the reason I need to drop Facebook entirely then.

People follow the path of least resistance and that path will not be Messenger, but something else, like Google hangouts.

Granted, it's been a while since I used hangouts, but surely that'll not be the path of least resistance. It's still a crap, web only interface? And google just launced Allo to kill video chats in hangouts, so I guess there's nothing left to save?

It'd be a good time for Duck Duck Go to revive it's XMPP server, and give it some polish, IMNHO.

I refuse to be pressured into installing Messenger. I will tell my Facebook contacts not to use Facebook messaging.

Oh, so it wasn't only me ~2months ago. I guess I ended up in an experiment ;-)

I think facebook is trying to apply the bargaining power as a monopoly service provider .Facebook is trying to act smart with new enduser agreement for messenger .Facebook knows that, most of their user base will switch to messenger .I think normal non tech saavy users dont bother much about this .

Brilliant. So much for being able to use Facebook on a non-Android device.

It seems that the actual problem is Android with their permission system.

Messenger recently started killing my battery life so I uninstalled it.

"Company makes product and decides how users should use it."

Yuck. I guess I can't be reached by fb messenger, then.

Previous long-time Facebook user here, but forgive my ignorance - what is Messenger? An instant message app I assume? How does this differ/improve upon the instant messaging built into every phone?

Messenger is a facebook instant message app.

It improves on what is already built into your phone because it hooks into all of your facebook contacts, which means full names, and pictures.

Not much of an improvement, IMHO, to warrant all this grief.

Screw you FB!

It's really sad to me to see a bunch of intelligent people here being led like sheep by Facebook (no, this isn't a sheeple post, hear me out)

Virtually everyone here complains "Facebook does XYZ really bad but I still use them because all my friends are there".

I have a solution. Why don't you get all your friends off there? Pick a platform that you really like and start evangelising. The only reason why Facebook has as much power as it does is because of user lock-in, but that use lock-in is only strong because no one fights it actively.

Example. A while ago, WhatsApp didn't have a webapp. Telegram did. I prefer typing on my laptop instead of mobile if I can. Therefore, I started evangelising from WhatsApp to Telegram. Now all my friends are on Telegram. (They didn't leave WhatsApp, but now they use Telegram between them). (BTW, I kind of regret this now that WhatsApp has a webapp AND encryption by default, but that's another story).

So, stop complaining and do something about it.

This is exactly what I did, and I'm so happy I did. I'm now Facebook-free which is something I didn't think I could get (albeit I lost contact with a couple of people I rarely spoke with).

I'm using Telegram a lot lately (although it was more about other people bringing me in rather than me bringing them over) and I still wouldn't switch to WhatsApp now. The webapp requires your phone to be turned on and connected (as it acts as some sort of bridge or something?) unlike Telegram which "just works" once you give permission.

Plus I find the whole infrastructure to be much nicer for group chats (with nice things like bots that are quite useful).

> I have a solution. Why don't you get all your friends off there?

While I don't disagree with your goals, it's not just moving your friends and family off Facebook. It's also moving their friends and family off as well. And all the groups they are associated with, and the people they interact with.

This is one reason I refuse to use Facebook's messaging app. There are plenty of ways to contact me on my phone. My friends know what they are. I don't see some Facebook messages, but that's just too bad.

Sounds like you're really cool.

It's not clear to me why I should be upset that messaging was split out from one app to another? Why is that "being led like sheep"?

It's not that you have to install two apps instead of one, it's that you have to install one app instead of none. Previously you could access it from any web browser.

My comment on sheep is being misunderstood in the original post.

I'm not calling people sheep for liking an app. I'm calling people sheep for not questioning the lore "that no one leaves <insert social media> because all their friends are there".

Thanks for the tip on telegram. Whatsapp's requirement that your phone be connected is needlessly aggravating.

Exactly. But back in those days Telegram was WAY ahead of WhatsApp (in terms of features). Nowadays, the ability of logging in onto the webapp without your phone is pretty much the one thing that Telegram does better. I read somewhere (maybe on HN?) that to have end-to-end encryption for some reason it has to work the way WhatsApp does it. I don't know why, but it's consistent with the fact that Telegram does not allow encryption on the webapp. I'm not an expert on this though.

Then the gravitational pull you have on your friends and family seem to be far greater than what I have.

Because besides incredibly few exceptions no one uses another Smartphone App for me, no one wants to have an explanation how IRC works, and E-Mails seem to be good for everything but writing to me.

No one will change their behaviour in any regard just for me. Maybe because I am not one trying to force something down other people's throats, that's not my style. Maybe you were one of those hardcore social media users people couldn't live without, but for the occasional twice a month conversation online and the 1 like a week, I won't be missed nearly enough.

And this is also the sentiment I have received multiple times from others who have abandoned social media at some point. So I strongly suspect your case is an exception and not the norm, and maybe you are portraying it as a little bit easier and positive than it was or is.

I was thinking something along similar lines. It's not like I brought my friends to Facebook in the first place - we all just ended up there. Even worse, so did my parents and their friends. If I had brought them to Facebook in the first place, that'd be one thing, but it is so big it has it's own pull, and honestly I don't think I can compete with that. What's more is I don't want to - if I have to hard sell someone on switching to Slack, for example, I'm now the Slack expert to them forever.

The shame of it is that the alternative is miss stuff, and who wants to do that? I would rather deal with a shitty Facebook app on my phone that I can force quit when I'm done with it than feel like a self-exiled citizen of my own community. It's defeatist, but whatever - humans are social creatures for the most part, and I don't want to separate from the herd over something stupid like an app on my phone.

as I reflect on the sentiment of this message, I am brought to tears.

these soldiers won't fight to save their own asses, much less will they risk their own necks. their friend's just wound up here.

it's not my fault.

we failed before we tried.

We tried. It didn't work.

Why? I like Facebook. It's a pretty well designed social application. I'm using it a lot more than I was a year ago, primarily for interacting with technology groups on it.

Some people just like complaining.

Really people should complain about Twitter's inability to innovate at all. They were the one Western Social Network capable of taking FB on, and yet it's basically the same thing it was 5 years ago. I use Twitter a lot too, but I wish for what it could be.

For me, it's two reasons. First, they have a history of changing their policies that mess with what the user has explicitly set in the past (e.g., changing all the e-mails to facebook.com ones, changing private things to public). That's what prevents me from using Facebook.

But, for those that use Facebook, the apps have a history of being poorly written and do things that drain your battery even when you're not actually using the app. That's why people want to use the web interface. At least with the web interface they know the web browser should be reasonably behaved. Making this change to push people to the app instead of using the web means that you now have to watch your app battery usage more closely if you start using Messenger.

On iOS (I don't know about Android) you can see how much time app is spending in background. If it's an app designed to run in the background like a music or podcast player, seeing a lot of background time is normal. For an app like Facebook, that's a problem. Every few days I check my battery usage per app and it all breaks down pretty much as I expect. The apps I use the most are all using the most battery and in the rough proportions I expect. That's not been the case recently with Facebook at least according to the stories I've read documenting the problem.

Facebook apps are fine for battery usage for me.

I'm sure if I fussed enough, I could get a handful of my friends to use some app I was fixated on, just for me, and they'd do it just to avoid stressing our friendship to its end as I drone on and on about privacy and encryption and sheeple.

Yes, but this wasn't something that no one cares about. Typing on your laptop is objectively better.

The only reason why Facebook has as much power as it does is because of user lock-in, but that use lock-in is only strong because no one fights it actively.

Therefore, I started evangelising from WhatsApp to Telegram

Telegram is also a close silo. Tell your friend to use programs that use an open protocol like XMPP [1].

Please read [1]

[1] https://communicationfreedom.wordpress.com/jabberxmpp/

No, that's not what I wrote. You copied two phrases of mine together to give them a different meaning.

No, this was pretty much a sheeple post. I'm following the herd of friends and family to Facebook because that group is large and my 40+ cousins, most of whom are blue collar and happy just to have place to share baby pics, are uninterested in bizarre discussions about corporate malfeasance.

How did you make your friends use telegram instead just for you? I use iMessage with my best friend and my dad because it is my preferred way of communication (it is fairly secure, easy to use, and I can reply from my watch, Mac, iPad and iPhone, unlike any competitor except email). For everybody else I have to use what's app because they cannot be bothered to install an app just to contact me once a week (or some even once a month) and email (my second preferred method of communication) is too complicated, clumsy, old, or just too uncool for everybody to use (except for checking for that registration link on Instagram).

You cannot just move a large group of people to another platform if you don't have any authority over them (e.g. their boss) unless they want to switch on their own (because their previous method is too unreliable, inconvenient or expensive).

I, for one, would be happy if I can make my teacher believe that WhatsApp is not a good idea to contact me for various things regarding my final exam. The best way to reach me is always through email.

Woah. Your professor requires students to have whatsapp? That's messed up.

We are not required to have it but she has my number and prefers to use WhatsApp to message me (nothing important just little annoucements and suggestions such as what topic to choose for my final oral exam). All official stuff is still written on paper. She probably uses WhatsApp because everybody at my age (who lives in my country) uses it all the time and she thinks this is more reliable to conntact me.

"Hey did you check out that app I asked you?"

"Hey, the other day I wanted to text you and it's so much more comfortable if I can type from my laptop, would you please install it? It's just like WhatsApp, you won't even see the difference."

"Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his company, how insane is that? He's now cloning WhatsApp, but better, could you please check it out?"

etc etc if there's a will there's a way

> "Hey did you check out that app I asked you?"

  - "Installing an app is always so complicated"
  - "Why not stick with WhatsApp. It works fine for me"

> "Hey, the other day I wanted to text you and it's so much more comfortable if I can type from my laptop, would you please install it? It's just like WhatsApp, you won't even see the difference."

"What's wrong with your phone?"

> "Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his company, how insane is that? He's now cloning WhatsApp, but better, could you please check it out?"

"What's better? And why would I trust a Russian more then WhatsApp. I don't really think it is a good idea to install it"

I haven't even made up those answers, I've heard them one way or the other. For most people, their phone just has to work and unless they mean a lot to you, they won't really bother installing it. If most of your friends are tech savvy, then your chances are good they are curious to try it out, don't mind it at all, or even support you. But most just don't care and are afraid they break things if they installed a new app.

I can even fully understand their decision. A friend of mind decided to ditch WhatsApp altogether and now I can only call her because I'm not willing to pay 15¢ just for a normal text message. She only did it because she wanted to have to deal less with social media but I don't want to. I turn off notifications for WhatsApp every now and then if I don't want to get distracted but all in all, I ust WhatsApp for 95% of all my personal text conversations.

> Why don't you get all your friends off there?

That is a bit naive. If you have friends from different backgrounds and periods of your live with different interests than yourself, i can tell you that most of them could care less than to change the messenger of choice because someone likes a different messenger more for reasons they don't care about.

One reason I have a fair number of friends is that I don't evangelize to them.

I've known of a few people that have tried that and ended up with less people to talk to. Most people don't care about news like these or the privacy complaints. Messenger is just the easiest way to get in touch with people in their social circle. Unless it's your significant other or best friend, they're not going to install a new app and make a new account just for you.

"Doing something about it" is a good idea. As others have noted, your approach is unrealistic to the extreme.

A far better approach would be to create a tool/alternative platform that allows people to interact with Facebook and their Facebook friends, without directly using the app. It might be a bit of an arms race with Facebook if the tool is scraping the site, but there isn't a lot they can do to stop it if a lot of the users are using a Chrome extension or various other client side tools.

That means that people that come to your tool/app/page are not stuck interacting with only those other users who have left Facebook. Which of course would be terrible, except for tiny little pockets of people here and there who only interact with one another and all have the same concerns about Facebook. (maybe the OP belongs to such a group...but I've never known anyone like that)

If you were to build this, you wouldn't have the immense disadvantage of having a tiny network to begin with. Eventually, as more as more people join you, you can tweak your strategy, when you are no longer such an underdog. Obviously, such a system would have to be open source, and open to all the "alternative platforms" as well. Maybe to participate people have a choice of a paying a small subscription or viewing "nice" ads, or maybe none of the above if enough of their contributing friends approve them. Or something. Maybe it would be a WeFunder project. All options should be considered.

I'd suggest anyone thinking about this first do some reading on Game Theory, Tragedy of the Commons, etc. Don't design something that expects everyone to individually do something that is against their interest, or you WILL fail.

I have stopped using Facebook (Twitter and everything social) half a decade ago. I don't use messaging apps and turn on my phone only when I really need to.

Result: more free time to do interesting and productive things and people aren't bothering me as much. I have taken control of my life and I'm not being pushed around to do things based on notifications or desire for artificial status(likes, retweet, stars). Stop using these services that sell your privacy, control your communication, make hostile changes and in the end do not care about you.

I concur with you. I realized that social apps were taking too much of my time an uninstalled them from my phone. I only use my laptop to access fb and Twitter and I'm very happy with the move.

Try doing that as a mobile developer.

free time which now you are spending discussing about FB.

How is HN not a social network? (I'm not being snarky, I'm just curious on your line of thinking here)

There is no network or linkage between users? And people are not allowed to post inane topics or messages.

Pretty basic.

How do you think the voting ring detection works?

Some users post contact info in their profile, so there is the possibility for messaging (email). Yes, there are policies, and structure and many good things - I'm not sure that means that HN isn't a social network of sorts?

I suppose it might boil down to a technicality, but I always read "social network" as a graph that describes how a group is connected - not as some strict technological definition. So a bunch of people that informally meet at a cafe to discuss politics, art and other topics can be described as a social network.

That is an implementation detail not a feature.

each human can have multiple identities as well.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I deleted my facebook account several years ago and I still have contact with my real friends via phone and email and a thing called meeting up in real life. All I lost were the friends I never wanted anyway.

As a side note, my company recently had a meeting with execs of our national branch of facebook, and after that meeting about 50% of our execs went and deleted their account...

>As a side note, my company recently had a meeting with execs of our national branch of facebook, and after that meeting about 50% of our execs went and deleted their account...

I am interested, can you please elaborate ? (Feel free to email me - see my profile - if it is sensitive)

I'd rather not, it is sensitive, but I can tell you that the whole management at our company came out shocked at how FB operated, and not to the positive.

The issue was the "product"s (i.e regular people) privacy and the attitude towards them by the local FB management.

Thanks that makes sense to me, it is the level of insight I was after :)

Whoa, who would've thought that a multi-billion dollar company would ever make a decision in order to promote newer versions of their own software?!?! /s

The whole point of Messenger is to consolidate messaging infrastructure. Being able to glean customer interests from that is just a bonus. Mobile web app is horrendous, and they know it, this is the solution.

I agree that Facebook lacks that trust with people, but they have every right to try and make their platform better and more efficient, and don't necessarily deserve the knee-jerk "they're up to something!" like this.

So after this and screwing with Instagram (removed API access to timeline 3rd party apps used and enabled global curated timeline only) I wonder what will they ruin with WhatsApp.

I don't want notifications. I don't use FB to chat.

I'm totally happy with the web FB.

And, maybe I'm wrong, but it appears like the FB app using a crap-tonne of data in comparison with web.

Side benefit: FB app not following me around like a stalker.

fb account deleted.. just now

- Spend $18bn to acquire Whatsapp's current and future users

- Force people to download Facebook Messenger

- ???

- Profit?!

Where I live, messaging using Facebook is the most effective way to communicate with my phone company, my ISP, etcetera.

That is the only reason I use Facebook messaging (I communicate with friends using other services) and one of the few reasons I still have a Facebook account.

Installing Facebook messenger app is too much just for this.

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