Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

The analogy doesn't work because providing a vegetarian option is something you only have to do once, or at least only the few times the vegetarian friend has dinner at your house. Changing your messaging platform for a friend is more like becoming a vegetarian yourself and convincing all your other friends to go vegetarian to please your friend (because a messaging app is only useful if most of your friends are on it).

View on HN

There was a time when you could contact anyone on any platform through a centralized application which simply called into libpurple. Really the problem here is that you along with everyone else have caved into big tech's insistence on being incompatible with everything.

More than that. There was a moment both Google and Facebook could be contacted via XMPP so you could have one account to rule them all

Also, more people understand your morale position of "I don't want to kill animals".

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.

Probably true. Still, perceptions change over time. Not too long ago vegetarianism (never mind veganism!) was widely seen as an irrational fringe position.

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.

I don’t get your analogy having multiple messaging apps on your device is not forcing you to do anything. Just to get in the right messaging app to talk to your different communities. I mean my kids are doing that all the time between snap (their friends), whatsapp (family) or Signal (me) (and I’m pretty sure they use at least a lot more channels (discord, insta, etc.)

That can work if groups of contacts are still grouped by app, like friends and family using different apps and you don't need to talk to both at once. But in the example given by the OP, if one friend wants to use a different app than other friends, it would be really awkward. You'd have to copy every message to your friends twice -- once on the app with the other friends and once in the app for the contrarian friend. In practice, that friend would be left out of many social events.

Sure. The point was more about the many small frictions that may or may not exist in any given friendship, with a lack of messaging capacity being no more egregious than any other.

Demanding all your friends switch or kill their messaging apps is quite another matter, and an eccentric one at that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com