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Comment by vlkr | Hacker News Reader

You can easily replace your apple products, but not your social network apps. all your friends have to switch, too

Actually at this point I don't know anyone who uses social media applications. My kids, well teenagers, use iMessage and SMS and coordinate on Discord (that's not really a social network). My wife uses word of mouth and local referrals to run her hair business with communication via SMS/iMessage/email and a bookings app she has. All my friends use use email and iMessage. My parents both use email and/or SMS too.

The only thing I use any form of social media for is signing up to Twitter to tag Royal Mail or Hermes delivery in complaints about twice a year because they actually listen if you shitpost in public.

I see society functioning exactly how it did before if in 30 seconds time social media disappeared off the face of the planet.

I think your samples might be biased. tiktok has 800 million active users, Instagram has over 1 billion, and fb has 2.70 billion. Even with 100% overlap, that's still 35% of the planet

The point is more that nothing will change if they blink out overnight.

My understanding (not living there) is that in the US, Apple have a dominant position in group chat via their proprietary embrace-extend-extinguish version of SMS.

In my experience, it's relatively straightforward to get people to switch off WhatsApp/Messenger to Signal/Telegram, since it's just another app. It'd be more difficult if it held a privileged position in the OS.

This is getting harder and harder as Apple’s ecosystem becomes more comprehensive and more integrated. There are benefits of course but it’s pretty sticky.

OTOH I dumped Facebook years ago and haven’t missed it for a second. WhatsApp has proven a lot harder to wean off of since my friends refuse to switch.

I understand wanting to get rid of FB, but whats your reason for whatsapp? Whatsapp is end to end encrypted, so they can't get access to your messages, no? Is it just that they are owned by FB, or do you have greater security / privacy concerns that I am missing?

Same boat here. I dumped WhatsApp mostly because it's owned by Facebook, which I consider a bit of a privacy risk by itself. On top of that, the app requests access to lots of permissions I don't understand the need for.

Some examples: find accounts on the device, view WiFi connections, retrieve running apps, use biometric hardware.

I can see how the first two might be required.

"Find accounts on the device" is possibly required to connect to your account in order to get your contact list. "View WiFi connections" is possibly needed for getting internet connection.

I can't really see any possible use for the other two though.

I've only looked extremely shallowly at Android development, but I am aware that quite often you need to ask for some particular permission to get access to something that's not particularly obvious from the permission name.

Not trying to give Facebook a free ride here, I am well aware that there is a very high chance they want some of the permissions for "nefarious" purposes. I think companies should have some transparent way of publishing why they want a particular set of permissions.

I have seen companies showing a message along the lines of "we will be asking for <permission> we need to ask this for <reason>" and I do think more companies should do this.

Wifi makes sense, as you can configure apps to only work over wifi (and from what I remember you can do backups only when wifi is available).

I don't like having Facebook apps on my phone at all and I don't like them having the metadata on who I'm messaging and when.

Whatsapp contents are secure, but who you are talking to - what groups, what time, how often, is all valuable information.

If you are in a group with a lot of Facebook users that have elementary school kids but are otherwise unrelated, chances are you have one too. Facebook might even infer who you are, and your kids, even if you don’t have an account

Not to mention that most users continuously sync their contact list, and with that info FB can create a much broader and more precise graph of all the network connections. Cross that with, say, political groups you're part of, and you're not only exposing yourself but everybody else who's close to you, regardless of them using either app.

Same situation with WhatsApp. It's deeply engrained in my home country's social groups. One group of friends followed me to Telegram, along with my direct family... but my more distant relatives and other groups of friends didn't bite. The other difficult one was Facebook Messenger.

Guess I'm banking on people finally realizing how creepy Facebook is. But since some of my friends have abandoned Facebook in favor of Instagram, of all places... guess I'm playing the long game.

Which is the reason a lot of people refuse to use the Apple ecosystem. I do own an iPad but I use it exclusively for web browsing, email and reading books.

The only Apple app I use is the default Books apps and that is it, and I couldn't be happier.

Using an Apple device without having to deal with Apple's ecosystem is amazing, I only wish they would let Chrome be Chrome, not a reskin of Safari...

Don't give them a choice.

I uninstalled WhatsApp two years back and just told everyone I use Signal. No big lecture on Facebook is evil, why you have to use Signal etc etc.

Most people are busy being told what apps to install every 2 hours by some one or the other so they are already conditioned to being told what to do. Many just installed without even a question, cause they get tired of using sms or email with me for everything.

Yes! If you are reading this, please give Signal a try.

You might be surprised that a few people in your contact list might already have signal.

Signal has (or will very soon have, depending on when you update) group calls! This is very exciting I think. Together with the new and improved group chat, now is the perfect time to get started with Signal if you aren’t here already.

You might have more pull than you think. I was able to get my mum on signal on her iPhone. You don’t need everyone you know to be on signal. Let’s start with just the ones you talk to the most.

I've been doing this and have a fairly tech savvy circle of friends but so far I've only managed to get a handful of them to start using Signal.

I think hunan's just aren't very good at responding to threats that are somewhat vague and in the future.

Apple products have social media baked into them - and one that cannot be used on other devices. Remember iMessage exists?

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