Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway27727 | Hacker News Reader

No one in my circles cares about Facebook leaving Europe. Until they realize that Facebook includes Instagram and WhatsApp and they do actually use those other services.

Point being: to all the commenters saying no one cares, a lot more people care than you think.

View on HN

Eh. If all three of those left the US I would care exactly not at all. There are better alternatives and if FB et al disappeared suddenly it would just create room for those services to take hold.

In the last 5 years, Whatsapp has basically replaced SMS in many EU countries. The equivalent in the US is probably the combined market share of FB Messenger, Whatsapp, iMessage and Signal.

And if it went away it would be inconvenient for a couple of weeks as people move to Matrix :)

Is the sheer amount of centralised scale (and convenience for users) of whatsapp a good fit for a decentralised system like Matrix?

Yeah, I don't think Facebook wants to let people see how quickly they'd adapt and overcome to any of their services going away.

There was a forerunner of that last year when there was a massive exodus to Signal when FB changed WhatsApp's privacy policy to force users to allow sharing of data with Facebook. If they shut down, even people who were too apathetic to switch would do so overnight. I hope Signal has a contingency plan for scaling up 10x ready...

Whatsapp is often (not counting groups) easy to replace. Your part of the social graph is literally in your phone's contacts.

I agree, maybe I could finally get my friends on telegram, signal, etc

if WhatsApp goes people would move to signal or telegram.

Instagram is a bit trickier, but I'm fairly sure people would start making a new one immediately. You could even relatively easily transfer everything and everyone across using the zip you can get thanks to GPDR.

Yup, critical mass of users is WhatsApps main differentiator vs competing services.

Leaving Whatsapp is hard because everyone is using it. But suppose whatsapp becomes unavailable for whatever reason, people will turn to other apps within hours (actually within a hour). In fact many people already have Telegram/Signal on their phone (although not using it).

As for instagram, things are a bit different. But the way I see it, 1- general population isn't using it. 2- This is not a necessary tool like whatsapp. Something else will fill the void but it will take some considerable time.

Yeah but you're a nerd on HN. Of course your personal network doesn't care.

It's the normal folk that care.

Wouldn't everyone just switch to Telegram?

My understanding of Telegram is that it's big in eastern europe, but here in Ireland at least, it's got a reputation of "that thing you contact your drug dealer on".

Sure but if it and signal are the only game in town then it's time to "try that drug dealer app"

There would be a very bad development. Whatsapp has end-to-end encryption by default, Telegram does not.

I only use Instagram because some of my friends refuse to leave WhatsApp, and we still want to exchange pictures and memes.

I still avoid having any meaningful/private conversations on FB products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com