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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?