I caved in during the pandemic. Lots of dear friends and family members, especially elderlies who couldn’t be bothered with anything else, and volunteer work to help the medical emergencies.
It felt ridiculous to ask people to use other means of communications under such circumstances. My noble ideologies felt very small and I said fuck it. I’m glad I did.
It’s the only Meta service I use, but I’m a heavy user. There’s no turning back.
I received a response. Three months later. They said “please send more money and we’ll ship your item”. Very helpful. I’d guess they check that email inbox once every few months based on this.
I could use any existing XMPP server, or even start one, and be able to contact directly with any of my both Google and Facebook contacts
It was wonderful glimpse of what it could be if greed and drive to herd consumers into their own walled gardens wasn't the main driving factors.
Think of it this way: why doesn't Gmail just close their SMTP gateways and defederate from e-mail? Because there's shittons of systems that expect to be able to send mail this way. They'd have to spend loads of time and energy corralling people out of open standards and into a proprietary Gmail API for no externally-visible benefit.
That doesn't apply to XMPP. It was an entirely new protocol with only two very large adopters federating with one another. Legitimate automated systems that needed to send messages didn't really exist yet, so there was no legacy cruft holding people to the open standard. But there were plenty of spammers who realized that they could get into literally every Gmail and Facebook screen with it.
In e-mail, we have a complicated setup of blocklists, heuristics, and domain authentication to handle spam. This inherently costs more time and money to set up than just having a closed messaging system with sign-ups that are controlled by one entity. But the big e-mail providers deal with it because open[0] federation is an iron rule of the e-mail system.
[0] Ok it's more like "open if you spend enough time getting an originating IP that isn't on every blocklist, setting up SPF/DKIM, getting your recipients to add you to contacts and check the spam filter, and so on"
Coincidentally, just like not covering the nose with a mask in protest, this half-measure only makes the problem worse.
The only way to affect this is to pull up the mask. Stop the spread. Quit using such an app with explanations, offer alternatives to people seeking to contact you, support legislation that breaks shady business models like that, etc. Sadly, few people have courage to look weird, boring or slightly crazy in this way. (Not unlike people who are afraid to be thought of as ugly if they wear the mask.)
(I have no such problems with WhatsApp, but I’m guilty of the same with regards to Telegram. It’s built intentionally insecure by default: I have literally no contacts who use E2EE chats now, because those are opt-in and so half-assedly implemented—I used to have a couple of “secret chats” but one vanished and another broke so nothing is delivered anymore; we switched to plaintext and I keep postponing quitting the app.)
If enough people join you, it's a win. If not, you've wasted your effort / money / vote / time.
Sometimes it's hard to discern if that critical mass exists.
How did it start? Some people adopted it, then their friends adopted it, etc. How does it stop? The same way!
If people are made aware and meet resistance (e.g., a person they really want to keep in touch with who doesn’t use that app), things change.
A boycott that does not drive the company out of business is not automatically unsuccessful: more people learn about the issue, some stores might start stocking competitor’s goods, etc. In a functioning system, if a bunch of people voted for the loser the winner would feel the pressure to adjust policies (vs. if no one did and the winner feels righteous enacting the extreme version of the policies you disagree with), and if not well next time more people may support the losing party.
Chat programs are not stores in any typical sense of the word.
Chat programs are effectively clubhouses. Convincing a person that they’ve joined the wrong club, invested time and effort in the wrong club, and should make better and more informed choices in clubs…
Lol. Have you MET a human before?
Good luck and don’t hold your breath.
Chat programs are also not clubs. There is no associated identity. No hardcore WhatsAppers it Telegrammers.
In fact, if you regularly meet actual humans, you might find out that most of them simply don’t care.
You dislike WhatsApp? Give them something equally convenient but that cares about privacy and they will just use it. Refuse to add them on WhatsApp and if you are an interesting person they will install whatever you use, even Signal, to stay in touch.
Please keep it polite. I don't see how you can know that commentator's intent.
There's some opportunity cost you just can't accept. If your only two options are a) don't use Whatsapp or b) use Whatsapp to help your elderly neighbors, I'm going to think you're not a good person if you stick to your ideology in this specific case. You can't really start arguing 'what-ifs' because you don't know the details of their situation and the decisions they made, so we should take them at their word that those are the two options they considered.
All to say, the world isn't as black and white as sticking to your guns no matter what. People that want true change would do well to remember that, since a majority of folks do not think along these lines and act with much more simple motivators.
I also think that WhatsApp is evil, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of communication takes place via this medium. Doing without it altogether has real opportunity costs. In this respect, it's up to each individual to decide whether and how to use it. It's similar to criticism of consumption and capitalism: in the end, you still have to buy your food somewhere and pay for it with money.
That's a terrible comparison. One is a selfish moron, the other idealistic.
The way I read it was “hmm that’s nice, people are now able to see the lunacy of that period in such a way as to make an off hand comment like that.”
The masks did nothing positive. It was the law of the land in public health that they were useless at preventing respiratory infections before people in positions of power wanted to scare people into compliance with massive overreach of their authority, then it became “mask up.” And once everybody “masked up,” all we got was yet more confirmation that yeah they are pointless in trying to prevent respiratory viral spread. Even if they kinda, sorta worked for that, which they don’t, the costs are still far too high.
All the masks contributed to was oxygen deprivation, micro plastic inhalation, and the degradation of the fabric of society. Think about it, it was bad enough for adults trying interact with faces wrapped up and concealed, “think of the children!”(actual legitimate usage of the phrase, btw) much worse for them having to do the same. People were harassed, assaulted, tased, arrested, for not wearing a “mask,” it was insanity.
Stop being a creepy mask person.
But fair; if in the same country you can call. ( and if not, you can go thought a service allowing you to call abroad. Like the now senile Skype )
This is such a sad perspective.
Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.
I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.
In a lot of the world, WhatsApp is free (I assume some kind of payment from Meta to the telecom). There's no way Signal will compete with something that is bundled with every phone contract for whatever reason.
Do you have separate charges for Signal and/or WhatsApp?
When you WhatsApp all day sending videos, gifs, messages, voice messages, pictures, documents..I can consume up to 12GB per month, this costing me an amount of my 20GB data plan. While a other provider I can choose has a 20GB data plan with a unlimited WhatsApp bundle. Sadly they don’t offer eSIM and 5G so it’s a no go for me.
But I'm not going to be delusional about it, if literally hundreds of millions of people are depending on social-media business for their social happiness, I can see that it works for them.
I want a secure, trustworthy, minimally-viable telecommunications channel for some contacts. I support Signal, it has characteristics that I trust, including being open source.[1]
I also have shown other people how to enable Google's RCS messaging.[2] It's better than SMS.
Using an alternative sms app that sometimes upgrades messages to signal was nearly zero friction.
Keeping an alternative messaging app for one contact is borderline-charity.
I'd do it to help with network effects if I wanted to support the company, but the attempt at crypto integration already cost them my good will.
Crypto disposals are taxable in the UK and I believe in most other countries as well. So tax authorities have a legitimate reason to look into what's going on there. There is no right to privacy when it comes to buying and selling securities.
Meta Messenger, Skype, Whatsapp, Viber and Telegram? Tons of them.
We need to build and keep asking people whether they have Signal or would please get it.
MMS still don't work reliably for me (lost a message just last week that someone swear to have sent). And for a long time they were not free as well.
The difference is that MMS/SMS is standardized and agnostic to the client interface. While WhatsApp is proprietary and monopolizes the client.
We could easily have had a "internet direct message" standard implementing most of WhatsApps features. (Wait... Isn't that SMTP?)
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but what does WhatsApp bring that let's say email++ does not have?
... actually that's still the case in varying degrees and locations. And once you've got great market penetration in an area, there's little to no reason to switch unless the competition is noticeably better, which MMS really has no claim to.
Open standards hadn't.
Or if you're referring to MMS: insane user cost and insane unreliability, standards mean nothing if the implementations are all trash.
Not saying it should have, just that I don't really see the difference in functionality.
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/850:_World_Accord...
PS: I met a guy in Mali once, d'ya know them? [2] /s
Here I was expecting something from Tanzania or Kenya and we're back in Northern Mali!
I'm a bit old - I travelled extensively about the globe when I was younger doing geophysicsl survey work and ground truthing the transition from many paper map systems to WGS84.
Africa has some fantastic musicians.
All I can offer in return is some Australians and their collaborations ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDlbCfybbE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr3iI8gg2fo
English x Yolngu Matha x Bemba:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrM8Ly17lw4
Why not:
Here's some Kenyan fare for you, an odd mix of things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ig9DHit6K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or2sMfOcTtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb0k0LuJFw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMw5uOFyaU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Jwf-Y1uww
Tjamuku Ngurra is beautiful. I don't think I've listened to Aboriginal fusion (there's all sorts of interesting things happening there) before. My consumption of Australian music has mostly been limited to Tame Impala, whom I love, but this is special. Thank you so much for sharing.
Australian music is surprisingly broad for such a small (population wise, physically it's the same land area as mainland USofA (and together the US + Australia are less than the area of Africa ..)) .. "aboriginal fusion" (that works) is also broader than many might imagine.
To barely scratch the surface:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMqG_LyD9s4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdpoWcma4HE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBAv36KM4rI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myKF9mxAJ70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-AgvUEVm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7XevQAVoBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VMcnKM09w0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqfyHzL0G-o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJFfSmnCnY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWibGemExd0
(I can go on forever here)
Meanwhile, 'back in Africa' (well, perhaps, out of Adrica)
To be honest I never used Uber and never saw a taxi with stickers telling otherwise.
Likewise arranging trips with the local tourist agencies.
Here's what I find baffling. You had a single, curated, extremely limited travel experience, in (I'm guessing) a handful of places, in one country, over a limited time period. You extrapolated from that experience to making a bold, sweeping claim about an odd 1.2 billion people living in 54 countries. And with an air of worldly confidence, to boot. What you said of Africa is not even generally true of the city of Dar es Salaam, let alone all of Tanzania. How could it possibly be true for a whole continent? I'm genuinely in awe of both the audacity it takes to make such a claim, and the thought process that leads to it. I do feel a bit bad for singling you out (but only a little bad) since it's sadly not unusual for people to choose to talk about places in this way when they don't expect to be challenged.
I just say "can we use Signal? It's super secure." And people generally are fine to use Signal. They don't use SMS because it's expensive and many that own an iPhone in countries where Android dominate don't use iMessage because, well, few around them use iPhone and the interface (i.e., the phone number) doesn't really tell them that they won't get charged for a text message.
I've posted up in many countries, and it's rarely a show stopper.
It's not perfect: when you connect with people they can easily associate your WhatsApp account with your identity (add contact) and also share info/pics/etc about you that you wouldn't want shared. They can do this even if you're not on WhatsApp, and Meta can use face recognition and other techniques to create a profile for you, then associate that profile with the other days and profile they have for you. It's trivial to narrow the down to a few million users then match on photo etc. Unclear if they bother, given that 99% of users just give away their privacy.
Also, Whatsapp verification uses SMS. If they'd used a verification URL, they could've (bounced through) Facebook.com, Instagram.com, etc and associated the account via (first party) cookies. I'm guessing they don't because 99% of users happily give the app all the permissions it needs and SMS is more universal.
Mine are annoying too, but I keep them because they also keep me in the loop.
Absolutely increases it's stickiness.
If they are really your only option, you can use whatever insane platform they are on long enough to forge a couple friendships, explain your stance and then quit.
If they are your friends they will understand, if not it wasn't worth the effort to begin with.
Most people will not, in fact, understand why you are so picky about the chat platforms you are willing to use, and they will think (correctly, I would say) that you care more about your social media stances than you care about their friendship. So you will think they were not worth the effort to begin with, and they will think the same in return, but ultimately they are not restricting their potential friend pool nearly as much as you are. If it works out well for you, great, otherwise you have to be a bit more pragmatic.
Poor reasoning. "We should go do hard drugs together, we're friends, right?", "You should just let me have sex with you, we're friends right?".
Using friendship as a cudgel is disgusting, and quite frankly, unfriendly. The above examples are extreme, but there is a cost to everything.
Pragmatic-ism cuts both ways.
It is perfectly fine to value certain things over friendship. You just have to be conscious of the friction that your convictions will cause and ask yourself whether it's worth it for you. Health is worth it. Chat apps? I don't know. If you ask me to use Signal, that seems reasonable enough and I'll do it, but if we're a group of 10 coordinating over Whatsapp and you want me to tell you whenever plans are being made, it's like, OK, but I'm doing the effort for our personal convos, can't you meet me halfway or something? That's the kind of friction you're going to deal with. Up to you.
If the content is compelling enough you will chat where you both agree to. If not it is like telling someone the only way you will talk is in the park by the chess tables.
Sure maybe you talk to them by chess tables sometimes, but if they won't meet you for coffee then they aren't your friends, just chess table acquaitances.
Real example: My friend group has a hiking group on WhatsApp and there is one friend who is not on it. One person will propose a hike, and will keep messaging the group with information about it. Someone then has to message that other friend and tell them about it, every time there is a slight adjustment to plans.
Let's say you are my friend, and Bob is arranging a hike for 10am on Saturday. You usually come on the hike so I let you know. Even though all the details are on the group, you ask me all the questions and I have to fill you in. Then on the morning of the hike Darcy's car breaks down and the time gets rearranged from 10am to 11am, so then I have to tell you that as well because you aren't on the group chat, and suddenly I feel like I am becoming your PA (and if I forget to tell you the time has changed then suddenly it's my fault - even though i'm not arranging the damn hike and you could have been on the group in the first place you just refuse).
My life is so annoying as a result of you, now I have to buy and maintain another phone, and then remember to check it, for your app.
Maybe, you could use something we agree on, like <insert plethora of choices>".
Ugh, I might but it's annoying for me (your friend) to be your personal messenger whenever there is something you might be interested in on the group chat.
Why is it on me to keep you in the loop? It's why we created the group chat, Dave.
Particularly that time when you got all annoyed at me for not being invited camping - I didn't even organise the trip in the first place, it's not my job to tell you about every event on the group chat just because you won't download WhatsApp.
In countries where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, it is used for more than just messaging friends.
For example, many childcare places will send updates through WhatsApp groups. So you have to convince the business and all their clients to switch to signal or do without notifications for your child's childcare.
You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.
At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.
This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".
Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.
Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.
As an adult, how do you make the strong bonds that lead to people going out of their way to remember to invite you to things? Maybe you meet someone and click immediately, more likely it's someone you know from work, and commonly it's acquaintances from seemingly superficial activities that become close friends after you're mingled and mixed with enough folks to find your tribe.
"everyone complains about group chats being noisy" but there's a good reason they're still in there (obviously a big part of it is fomo but it's not obvious to me that everyone's lives would be better rejecting them. Human social dynamics are messy and not efficient).
But like, the world is going in a direction sadly where meaningful human friendships are disappearing, being replaced with endless acquittances who do not care about you, and you do not care about them either. Which I find really sad.
Most of organising problems are btw due to the lack of effort, not a true lack of time. "I am busy" is usually just a convenient excuse to why you don't want to do something together, not that you don't actually have time. (You do have time binging netflix, do ya?)
Yeah, the internet has been a blessing in the past in terms of socialisation, but nowadays, it has made it even worse than before. IRL activities are dying because everyone is on social media - but not spending any time with each other, just scrolling alone. I find it very sad.
With that being said, if you want to chat, I'd be happy to :)
You made an effort to reach out by other means, and they ignored you? This is an odd definition of a "friend".
We've all lost touch with friends. That's how things happen in life. We move on and what not. If you're using one app to talk to all your buddies and one person messages you on a different app. It's very easy to not even notice the other app especially if they don't have it installed or don't get notifications and only go in and check messages once a day and go through the list so they don't get constantly distracted.
I don’t use any of these social media sites, don’t use WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or whatever else is out there, and still manage to have a robust social life and actual friends. They know my phone number if they want to talk, and I know their numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated or mediated by some megacorp.
Can you tell us a bit more of the benefits/upsides of your decision?
And then seeing him in non phone review videos reading stuff constantly from... his iPhone :-)
Because my opinion is that my friends willingness (or preference) to use a non secure messaging app owned by a giant tech corp has very very very low correlation with whether I'd like them to be a friend.
I'd also point out that this is exactly how bubbles occur. "Everyone I know hates WhatsApp/Facebook/whatever" says the person who refuses to communicate via those platforms.
No it isn't. You'd be surprised in the variety of people that you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so. Just because you only maintain relationships with people who are not so glued to WhatsApp that they won't communicate through any other means, does not mean you have created a bubble for yourself.
It's true you are always able to avoid bubbles, and nothing I say precludes that ability.
However, information bubbles are a function of friction and defaults. If communication lessens with a people who don't share a particular view (ie, that Whatsapp has to be avoided) then that friction lessens exposure to that viewpoint, forming a bubble.
> you meet when you don't use algorithmic systems to do so.
AFAIK there is no algorithmic system on Whatsapp to meet people.
It isn't. Nor did I say it was. The person I replied to said that not using WhatsApp is how social bubbles are formed. It isn't. That's what I was refuting.
They might do something when they get there and talk to people who are doing the same thing (or who just happen to be there).
I'm sure that is true. I was suggesting alternative ideas to calling random phone numbers as a means of getting out of one's "bubble".
Like you, the choice of messaging app is quite beside the point (except FB Messenger being out of the question for reasons I'll explain). So, I still use a combination of WhatsApp, Signal and Skype.
If a friendship depended on me having a Twitter/FB/TikTok/Instagram profile though, I'm more likely to let that fade away. Similarly with dating: it'd be a dealbreaker to have to maintain a social media presence or find someone solely through Tinder or Bumble or whatever. I enjoy life more without social media in it, and without tech companies gatekeeping human connection through a mobile app. Some things just have to stay offline for the sake of me and my mental health.
Which I guess is a useful filter if you want to be surrounded by techies and ideologues.
- They still collect things like your location, your call history, etc. In Brazil it's quite common for people to use WhatsApp to call their doctors. This means that Facebook can know what type of health issues you have just by checking if you are calling/texting a specialist.
- They are still owned by Facebook and they take whatever data they can to feed the Borg.
- I can not prove it, but I am convinced that they scan the video stream in the device.
Lots of people are currently willing to make that trade, at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
> at least until a competitor comes along that offers something better.
Next year, the EU is going to force all messenger platforms to interoperate. Then we will be able to really compare.
You can't prove it, alright. But do you mind sharing why you are convinced they scan the video stream?
It's nothing really embarrassing or wrong, but I worry that it might be taken out of context.
If 20 of your friend's are using Whatsapp to communicate just fine, and you demand they change their mode of communication to suit your needs.
I'm starting to see why the trope of techies are anti social is so prevalent. Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
There exist systems which may violate your privacy, and you think that a possible demand to use them from any third party would be "fair", aproblematic?!
Good normalcy is that if some acquaintance put as a condition any controversial constraint, such as destructive behaviour ("binge drinking" etc.), irresponsible behaviour, degrading behaviour (that spyware is part of this latter) - the reply is simply "No".
And that would be antisocial behaviour, "No, I will not get tattooed (etc.) just because you would like that"?!
Children have replaced Men in this world.
Edit: oh, and by the way: behaviour that would stick to the framework of proper Society would be «[anti-]social»?!?!?! That is a dire reversal terms, and it shows the (satanic) perversity these """societies""" have reached.
> Some of you really are absolutely socially inept.
So if someone tells you "I'm sorry, I am not available at this channel, can we arrange some other method?" and you refuse to accomodate you take the other as socially inept?
It seems like you are projecting. Hard.
It's not so weird to expect that your friends will acquiesce to your demand that they wear a seatbelt in your car, for instance.
Your post seems to be assumptions loaded. It sounds as if you were accusing strawmen of expecting people to behave rationally, wisely etc. That image has been superseded even in the theoretical grounds in which it had been used historically as a premise (e.g. Economics).
But hey, I draw a line in the sand at the instant messenger! :-)))
And your reply remains "No", right?
Previously I used Matrix/Element but never got it to work reliably with my friends (decryption issues, session verification obsession). And Signal has no web app. So WhatsApp it is for now.
Unfortunately I cannot just walk away from it because of this.
And we can all thank the EU that it will be forced to open the API to other chat applications!
Few people understand "this messenger is slightly less privacy focused. It's owned by Meta. It's against my principles".
I am vegan so I would definitely break ties with friends that make mean "jokes" about veganism or myself. But I certainly would never let go of friends because they want me to use WhatsApp.
Similarly, I live sans messaging for the simple reason that I never upgraded to a smartphone. In the 2000s this solicited reactions of amazed befuddlement and surprise, occasionally mirth. Nowadays, in my experience, most people intuitively understand the decision.
Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.
Then, from A's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for B to communicate through alternative means. And from B's perspective, it is just a small accommodation for A to use $APP.
"Look, I am not letting Zuck suck up my personal data and watch ads if there is an alternative that's owned by a non-profit, does not show ads and end-to-end encrypts everything as a rule."
Asking to use Zucks apps anyway as a small accommodation would paint the one asking as an ignorant who is being unreasonable and does not take care of their digital hygiene properly. Sure, they might resent the other person for pointing their own failings out, but it's hard to actually argue.
Within their value system, they're not being ignorant. Rather, they're perfectly rational.
There is an incentive to converge to $APP, the tradeoffs are not collectively symmetric when one $APP is already globally dominant.
Those people were not your friends