Signal is drop in for WhatsApp and I can tell everyone I talk to on WhatsApp to just contact me on Signal instead. What do I tell people to move to from EMail?
Sure, it is not open source and but federated. Signal, Wire, Matrix, etc should catch up in the next years.
What do you need from Email that a messenger lacks?
Identity management that is not smart-phone/phone-number based.
Better UI for long form messages, including citing previous lines.
Better support for adding people to ongoing conversations.
UI for conversations per topic rather than per person.
Mailing lists, and the ability to filter them to different folders (or equivalent UI elements).
Functioning as a searchable database of documents I have received. (Important detail: Attachments aren't independent messages: They are attached to often long form messages that describe their content).
Basically, WhatsApp does a subset of what EMail does but dramatically better and encrypted. But that covers only half of my email usage at most.
Yes, I guess that is the way forward. Split email into a set of different applications. Maybe one of them will take over the rest at some point.
Whatsapp desktop/web is terribly slow and requires your cellphone to be on at all times. Also, you cannot have whatsapp desktop/web active on more than one computer at any time.
Also, I do have several identities (work, leisure, even one-offs for website registration/communications) and no, I don't want to give my personal cell number to everyone.
They have a rather sound reason for the cellphone requirement, though. It's because the messages are stored only there and the desktop/web application is just a gateway to your phone.
https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/web/28080002
This seems like a more secure way to do it than what the others do, which is to store the messages in their servers.
The people without smartphones that I work with can use email.
I can get to my email anywhere, everywhere, whether I have a phone or not.
Of course that may be considered an anti-feature from the point of view of security, but it explains why IM apps can not replace email.
Discussion threads. Say I work on two different projects with the same colleague, or that I am also friends with a coworker and do things together outside of work. In whatsapp the different topics would all be mixed together into a big mess. With email I can just reply to a particular thread.
What messaging system other than email allows for topic based discussion? I guess you could abuse groups to donsomething similar, but its not wuite the same.
The underlying one person to one person philosophy of messaging apps is infuriating for organised discussion over time. It makes finding info discussed harder too.
Does anyone have any suggestions for messaging apps that don't put person to person front and center but topic discussion like email?
(You might argue the last point i made there, but go and make two separately stored discussions with the same person on whatsapp or signal or wharever... I'll wait).
IRC, Riot (Matrix in general), Slack, Discord, Rocket.Chat. There are quite a few.
I'm partial to Matrix, personally - you can invite a few friends for a room, and naming that room/setting a topic are optional, so either use case is fairly natural.
IRC is channels, Slack is channels, Riot seems to just basically be IRC, Discord is another take on the same genre.
None of them give you what email gives you.
With email there's not a person or group in sight in the UX, save for perhaps a 'from' entry in the thread list. It's all about info. I can start 100 conversations with the same person and have those threads organised into a timeline separately from each other. I can then also arrange them into arbitrary collections.
I can possibly achieve something sort of like this by abusing groups or channels in these other apps, but then what? I just get a sidebar full of the things - what do I do with them? Can I search them and the info within from a global panel? Can I organise them into folders? Copy them to other accounts with a simple drag and drop?
Email has quite a different focus than all those apps you mentioned which is probably why nothing has replaced it.
Just create a group for each context and name them properly.