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>Third, and this may be controversial, I would get your son an iPhone, I assume the dependence for cell phones has only gotten increasingly higher post-covid and feeling left out at that age can hurt pretty bad.

We've definitely made some of these concessions with our kids more lately. They don't have phones yet, but they do have iPads, and it is already apparent how pervasive the iMessage ecosystem is. If they were on Android they'd be the only ones not in their friends iMessage and Facetime groups, which would be pretty isolating.

Another commenter talked about spending $300 as a targeted fix to a problem. The idea that just doing the simple thing is sometimes the best choice resonates with me. I recall being bullied in a PE class in highschool. After so much uncomfortable intervention by teachers I was like, "oh ffs can't you just move me to the other class so I'm away from these assholes?". And they reluctantly did, and things were better. No it didn't address any root causes, but it make my life much nicer for 4 months which was very appreciated.

I had a similar experience as a kid. In 6th and 7th grade, I was pretty heavily bullied, and throughout the second year I tried to convince my parents to let me transfer to a different school. After 7th grade, my parents decided that it was worth trying, and I ended up transferring to local, much smaller school (there were only around 40 students in the entire 8th grade the year I was there, so teachers were able to keep an eye on things better instead of using the perennial copout of "we didn't see it, so it didn't happen" to avoid having to even attempt to address the obvious negative social dynamic at play). Not only was I suddenly much happier, but suddenly my fairly average grades of B's and C's turned into mostly A's; I always tested well, but my general unhappiness fed my anxiety, which caused me to often forget assignments and not put in as much effort as I otherwise could have. Seeing this, my parents also let me attend a different high school than my brothers had, where my academic turnaround continued, and due grades before 9 not being considered at all for college applications, I was able to get into a much better college than I otherwise would have and put me in a much better environment (both in terms of motivation and exposure) to end up landing a good software engineering job out of college. Looking back at it, it's hard not to see my parents' decision to let me switch from a place I was severely unhappy to a place where I could be comfortable and develop more socially as foundational not just for my emotional well-being but the necessary catalyst for me to be able to reach financial stability virtually right after college graduation. It's hard to imagine how different my life would be in almost every way if I didn't have that opportunity.

Yes. We have a no apple house but I bought my kids iphones because of the iMessage monopoly. It's not that they are looked down on for blue bubbles but that literally they CANNOT participate in group texts! Apple should burn in hell for that....

I wish US kids would move to Whatsapp like the rest of the world but that's what we have here.

Moving to WhatsApp is hardly an upgrade. Having to trust the encryption out of Meta and be required to share your address book/contacts and metadata with them is not the future we should want for the next generation. It's not a "rest of the world thing either"; I'm out here in SEA and the only folks to ask me for a WhatsApp (don't have) were Europeans.

Moving to WhatsApp takes out the Apple restriction, which is a step up as I can use WhatsApp on Windows and Linux too.

The drawback is the phone number requirement, but this is true of all the other chat apps. If there was one that was functionality equivalent but accounts didn't require a number then I would switch.

I can agree any Apple-specific lock-in is not good, however you're talking about the ability to chat on the platform and not going beyond just access to include whether we should be trusting our data to that platform—different questions. Both XMPP or Matrix have clients on all OSs, lack a phone number requirement, but can also both be self-hosted + decentralized, and with open specs and you can read the source on the encryption to validate the trustworthiness. These are the routes we should head and there's nothing stopping folks from using them today other than they don't have a for-profit entity to market them.

Obviously, this goes back to the root issue as there are philosophical reasons to straight prefer certain technologies—like the ability to side-load apps on your pocket computer—that you should try not to compromise on just because of peer pressure.

I agree, I dislike sharing any data with Facebook/WhatsApp but I shouldn't require children to spend $1000 to be allowed to communicate.

XMPP would be preferred, but isn't quite as simple as iMessage/WhatsApp at the moment, and Matrix isn't the same. I do see that some of the XMPP clients are getting pretty slick and I could probably move the family to something like that soon enough.

You may or may not like https://snikket.org.

It's a bunch of XMPP software (Conversations, Siskin, Prosody), with minor patches, under a common branding (the Snikket parrot), plus a web portal.

It's aimed at the friends&family use case, with an easy invitation-based onboarding workflow. You can either self-host a Snikket Server (= Prosody + TURN + certificate automation) or sign up for the hosted beta (which is either bring-your-own-domain or a domain under snikket.chat).

Note that snikket.org is not, by itself, an XMPP service where you can just sign up. You either need to run your own instance, or you need to sign up for hosting.

I will give it a go, cheers

I self-hosted ejabberd on an 2014 smartphone using postmarketOS last weekend. The defaults were almost all good enough and the only tricky part was setting up all the networking bits (getting my domain names hooked up to nameservers, dynamic DNS, Nginx proxy on the router to get ACME certs from the built-in ejabberd module) because these aren't thing I work with on the regular. Performance for users countable on one hand hasn't been an issue. Self-hosting Synapse for Matrix on an at-home device... good luck.

It's definitely a "vast majority of the world" thing (except China I guess). Check this list:

https://eagernomad.com/most-popular-messaging-apps-by-countr...

> hardly an upgrade.

It's a huge upgrade. It's not perfect but it beats being forced to buy iPhones by a mile. Facebook already has the address book of most people anyway. The extra metadata they get from WhatsApp is marginal at best.

"Vast" has subjectivity to it, and neither of us will bother doing this per capita, but China, as well as the US, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines have massive populations and it's not the most popular in them.

I suppose if the low-hanging goal is better than iMessage lock-in then sure. Saying Facebook has a lot of data already doesn't make it excusable--especially with younger generations not even having or wanting accounts (though Instagram, same parent, yadda). I actually don't think this is marginal either as it's not difficult to use Facebook from a browser or just not share your contacts, but a requirement is a different story, if this data wasn't valuable, why would they have payed billions to acquire a chat app with E2E enabled?

> I suppose if the low-hanging goal is better than iMessage lock-in then sure.

Sadly that is the low-hanging goal. There's pretty much zero chance we will ever get a perfect e2e encrypted, federated, decentralised, open, spam free, popular IM system, but I would say WhatsApp is furthest towards that overall. If you exclude "popular" then Signal is probably the best but in IM systems "popular" is probably the most important characteristic.

Not having to buy a really expensive phone to use it is another important characteristic. If WhatsApp ever gets a foothold in America I guarantee Apple will open iMessage up to Android.

The irony is that I have some regrets pushing to move my family to Signal (mostly away from Facebook Messenger and SMS) while I've pondered a dumbphone or a Linux phone due to SIM card+Android/iOS primary device required. On this note though, it seems WhatsApp has pulled out on the upgrade to KaiOS 3.x which hurts accessibility to some folks.

We're not in an ideal spot and self-hosting is more complicated than it should be. That said, there still are options to join public Matrix and XMPP servers that cover the all the above features and would be accessible even on smaller mobile platforms like KaiOS, Capyloon, and all Linuxes.

But also… what if Apple converted iMessage to use one of those open protocols (like the reverse of how Google and Facebook's chats were XMPP until they decided there's more to gain making it proprietary after scaling with FOSS)? Sure tim@imessage.apple.corp would still give them a 'vanity' URL like the color of a message bubble, but at least everyone could participate and have all the same features on a technical level.

I'd recommend against the earn it approach to gain an object that is at the center bullying. People don't like to think of their own kids as possible bullies, but suffering and earning is basic justification to make one a bully towards those who "still don't have one."

Thinking about this a bit more, I agree. Definitely not a parent haha but I would struggle between just capitulating and buying an iPhone or just holding firm and saying no, so I was thinking of somewhere in the middle but looking back I can definitely see how that could also cause some unintended issues.