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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is really a problem. Communications have always been a messy thing over time, from language issues to reliability issues to incompatibilities and costs.

Regardless of what stands, it's pretty damn good at the moment. I have a pocket computer that talks to people all over the world. So I have two messaging apps on it? I'm not even bothered.

The thing is I don't actually really dial anyone with their phone number any more other than close family. Most of the time I will use whatsapp video calls because said other person is usually somewhere that roaming doesn't work and is tethered on a WiFi hotspot instead. Granted that uses name resolution via phone number but it doesn't need to.

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I disagree. I’ve lost touch with numerous casual acquaintances over the years because they went to one app and I didn’t or vice versa. If there was a better effort at standardization it would have been easier to maintain these connections rather than lose touch because some people went to Facebook messenger while others went to WhatsApp, discord, snap, etc and the fragmentation made it a nightmare to keep up with everyone. SMS is the standby but a surprising amount of people hate using text messages or email despite being completely comfortable with asynchronous text communication on other platforms. It makes no sense to me because it is functionally the exact same and the people I have met who have this concern are definitely not worried about things like message encryption

Additionally nowadays it’s becoming more common to be ideologically against usage of platforms and it sucks to be locked out of communication because of that. I don’t use meta products because I think they’re a disgusting company but a lot of my older family members refuse to move from the platform. If there was an open standard that allowed for me to use a platform I was comfortable with that could interoperate with Facebook messenger I could live with that.

I'm in a similar situation. Would you be happy interacting with Meta-product users via a non-Meta-product if it involved your data being stored (e.g. in a "shadow profile") and used to target ads against you? I'm not sure I would, but it hasn't cropped up yet.

I suppose that would be the inherent problem with such a thing. And twitter, google, etc are probably no better tbf

99% of people don't seem to care.

Granted that's a problem but really it shows everything is a matter of perspective.

> because they went to one app and I didn’t or vice versa

Why not? It doesn't seem difficult to just download and register for a new app. There's only so many major ones.

That actually highlights the other issue of fragmentation: sometimes I would bother to download the app and register but then we’d fall out because I wouldn’t regularly check an app for 1 or 2 people. It’s notifications get lost in the sea of notifications

If I could just have one app that allows me to cross platform communicate that would eliminate this issue. And of course let it go both ways

Fair. The sea of notifications thing is a problem.

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