The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.
The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/end-to-end-encrypt-whatsapp...
Yes, we do, because our friends and acquaintances are not HN users.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Not sure if on purpose or just serendipitous misspell.
I use whatsapp because my clients use whatsapp. Which means the team uses whatsapp. Friends are spread on several apps.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.
Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.
We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.
o/
We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.
It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips
Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I guess this is something to really think about as the commercial offerings are simply not very good outside Telegram but I don't really trust them with my data.
As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.
I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.
Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.
All my family and some friends use it as our primary platform for communication.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.
But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.
PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
It turns out that in the big picture, there are fewer people who are truly critical than most people think.
Especially individual contributors. There are rare exceptions but those, who truly make a difference, stand out.
I then switched to Telegram and haven't used WhatscrApp ever since.