All these (ad)ons always take priority over performance.
deleted by creator
Better than Twitter, but still not great.
Anyone trying to reproduce WeChat in the west is insane. Nobody needs it. Nobody wants it. The conditions that allowed it to take off in China do not exist in the west.
The only company with a real chance of success is Apple, and their business model is a little more resistant to such corruption, at least for now.
Facebook is the best positioned by far, they just need a popular payment service
Well they tried, but they gave up before it even released.
Anyone remembering Libra?
Here in Spain everyone uses whatsapp. I clearly see people buying products through the app from local businesses. I don’t necessarily like it, but it has high chance of being successful (not like channels, which will for sure be discontinued)
WhatsApp is a shithole. Communities, Channels, Payments, Avatars all these destroyed the simple chat app. Meta is aiming for a monopoly here.
Signal and Telegram pretty much useless if you don’t have your needful people on the platform.
It’s just not a battle I am willing to fight. Too many people I can’t contact without Whatsapp and none of them willing to swap.
Thanks to EU, you’ll be able to contact these people on WhatsApp without using WhatsApp.
That’s great to know!
Great, I can’t wait for Whatsapp to be the only way to reach customer support and make payments. I always felt the confused look of people when I tell them I don’t have Whatsapp wasn’t enough.
always felt the confused look of people when I tell them I don’t have Whatsapp wasn’t enough.
the worst part is that most people cannot fathom that you don’t have Whatsapp and you want to continue not having. The confused look is because their way of thinking is “ok you don’t have, so what, open an account, it’s taking 10 seconds”.
Same argument for installing Signal
When contractors try to get me to communicate with them on what’s appropriate, I am happy to tell them that it’s forbidden on company devices.
Typically that conversation started on email, which they don’t want to continue using for reasons they usually can’t explain well.
Today, on “Features No One Asked For”.
“Features board members demanded because they increase value for shareholders”
*except nearly the entirety of India, but who cares about a country with nearly a billion customers
Whatsapp turning into WeChat should make Signal and Threema look even better.
If only people cared. Sadly, they don’t.
Source: am one of probably three people in the country that refuse to use Meta CRAPWARE. And thus, very lonely.
I refuse to use anything Meta has its claws on.
Some folk do. I’ve managed to convince at least 10 of my friends and family to install Signal and/or Threema.
Me too and we’re very happy with it.
Even my employer is making us only use Threema work.
Do you think 99% of the grannies and non-techies care? I support Signal and use it myself to communicate (with the 2-3 other people that use it…), but it’s not comparable with WhatsApp or Telegram which everyone has. It’s shitty but it’s reality. People even use Facebook Messenger over Signal.
Threema at 6€ is not really a good option for anyone anymore, a least not over Signal. Also they had an encryption obfuscation problem recently, read the longer comments at the bottom here and decide for yourself:
I know people who prefer Threema simply because they know what their revenue model is. Everyday I find that another person in my contacts has joined Signal. I don’t communicate with too many grannies besides my own two, both of whom have Signal installed on their phones ftr. My circle clearly isn’t your circle.
I feel like FOSS apps keep getting more viable while closed source apps keep getting worse. I feel like the next version of the internet is the one few know about. Even Mastodon is getting better, and Lemmy is pretty much a reddit equivalent now.
Because with nonlibre/nonfree/closed apps, user interest is never at the front. It is only considered at the beginning when apps need to gain userbase, then they can exploit it.
Every app that take away user ability to inspect, modify or share it is creating a path for abuse.
“Enshitification”
a new word added to my. dictionary
Meta adding the same features to all their apps, for whatever reason
Everybody wants to be We Chat.
And WeChat sucks. The only reason it dominates in China is because the government mandated a bunch of social control stuff to run there making it virtually mandatory just to exist in China.
Western VCs wished they could have their shitty app being mandatory.
Look at El Musk and his “X app” obsession. He wants it so bad he burned the brand he paid BILLIONS to acquire just to chase his everything app.
I think part of his plan was to quickly roll crypto into it… but then by the time he actually acquired it Crypto took a huge downturn.
even the fediverse (kinda)
not really tbh
The maturity of decentralized communication cannot come soon enough
If only there was a standards-based platform that everyone could use, supported by all telecommunications providers. Ah dammit. Probably just a pipe dream. /s
XMPP should return to reclaim its rightful role.
Back in my day, the only decentralized communication we needed was yelling from the rooftops and we turned out just fine!
You should try snikket. It can run on a 1$/month VPS and gives you and friends/family a really easy to run xmpp server. Easy for not so technical people.
Hell no lol, I’d use an actual modern service like Element.
I find it harder to use. My account has several spammer chats that I can’t close for some reason etc…
You can just go into your account settings and deactivate
deactivate what?
Deactivate the account, and there’s a checkmark to delete all past messages
I don’t want to deactivate my account
It’s a little hard to imagine for us Americans, but internationally WhatsApp has a thriving unofficial ecosystem of businesses operating solely out of the chat app.
I love to hate on Meta as much as the next guy on Lemmy, but this is probably one of the sounder business decisions Meta has made in awhile.
as much as the next guy on the fediverse* not everyone uses Lemmy
This is lemmy, live with it
Sure
as much as the next person* not everyone is a guy
As much as the next entity* some of us are AI
THEY’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT!
That’s why I advocate for personhood for AI, some AIs are very literal and can’t help themselves sticking to definitions
Why do you reply to me and not the original commenter lol
Don’t use WhatsApp or Telegram. There are better things to use. (Signal, Session and simplex chat)
lol. "Don’t use the messaging apps used by all your friends and family. Use another app so you cant contact them. "
Man, messaging is a nightmare. I use signal with a few of my closest contacts, whatsapp with most other people, sms as a fallback and for work I have to occasionally use Teams and fucking Viber (ugh). At least I managed to liberate myself from the clutches of Slack.
If only there was some standard way to get these apps to talk to each other so everybody could use what they want. Oh wait, there was, it was called XMPP, it worked perfectly and big tech fucking killed it and replaced it with the irritating clusterfuck that is the current status quo.
Then get them on a different app. Be a leader not a follower
Imagine being required to have the same app as your friend to send a message.
Sure, I use Signal with some. But I will have to use WhatsApp to interact with most people. They won’t switch just because I tell them to.
Luckily they don’t have to switch. Your good friends from the European union have a solution for you (And the latest beta for whatsapp features the skeleton for their implementation of that standard)
Except Signal likely won’t adopt that, as they already mentioned some time ago
Wire…?
deleted by creator
During the peak of Whatsapp Controversy, I had 50 out 450+ contacts on Signal. Now it is just 5 people.
Signal shot it’s self in the foot removing sms capabilities. Tragic.
This is US defaultism. People doesn’t care about sms capabilities outside the US. The US isn’t a huge market for Signal.
I think it did effect things. SMS is weirdly popular in the US (i think it’s might be cause they didn’t use it much in the 90s?) but people I know in France and UK still use texts for some things, even if messaging apps are where most of communication happens (French people even use mms which is insane).
I know that I managed to convince a number of tech-shy people (including parents) to get Signal by telling them replaced their sms app, so it wasn’t a whole extra app / network they needed to use. It was great for me because I could ditch WhatsApp completely. But when signal stopped supporting sms they went back to just whatsapping and texting, so I cracked and reinstalled WhatsApp to keep in touch with them.
Liberia
No one I know use SMS for chat. The last SMS I had sent was 3 years ago.
I only use SMS for some communication because the only other form of communication my phone can do is calls. But I have to be careful with that because they’re paid and not unlimited.
Mostly because of the 400+ who remained on WhatsApp, the 45 of 50 decided to move back and the 5 probably are running both apps
True. They stick to WhatsApp as all th convo goes there and it laziness to switch over, copy data and all .
Srsly I hope people will start installing Signal once again.
Good. Keep cluttering the app until people move to simpler alternatives. Preferably libre.
I want out but no one in my group chats will leave. 😭
What I did was say I’m deleting my WhatsApp account in [insert sensible time] and if anyone wants to contact me, to use Signal. Lost contact to some, but many followed.
At the company’s global Conversations event in Mumbai, WhatsApp introduced an in-app shopping feature for merchants and customers. Dubbed ”Flows,” […]
That name sounds more like a feminine hygiene product than a shopping platform.
The software enshittification cycle continues.
