Every single person I know or meet uses WhatsApp. About 90% of the businesses I interact with use WhatsApp Businesses. My whole family uses WhatsApp.
Moving to another system is going to take a lot a lot of work.
Say it with me.... M O N O P O L Y
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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In business there isn't a monopoly just yet teams and slack are way more common
Correct. It's specifically prohibited on my company's devices.
We are required to use the company provided Teams for instant messaging.
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Isn't Whatsapp owned by meta?
If so, why do people use it?
Find the change. Be the change.
why do people use it?
because it gained popularity in countries where sending SMS used to cost money at the time, years before Facebook has purchased it, became the main means of communication, and it turns out that moving an entire country's (or even continent's) population away from a messaging app has proven to be difficult.
Also because MMS was/is dogshit and sending photos etc through WhatsApp was much better
Ironically, it got popular when it still tried to get users to subscribe to a monthly payment. And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular...
Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.
Whatsapp became popular because it was the only app that ran on everything in 2010, it ran on the newly appeared smartphones as well as on featurephones. Nokia, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, you name it, it was supported.
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Yep. It’s like that here and it sucks ass. Every person and business uses it. I think even the Gemente does in some cases.
Pretty much, I use Telegram always I can (I know it is not Signal, but there are tons of custom ROMs groups and channels and I use it to chat with closest friends), and oh boy it is just better than WhatsApp in any aspect since... Since I don't remember when I started to use it... It just got updated with an enhanced reply system (quotes) and it is awesome.
Meanwhile family, companies and pretty much everyone else is at WhatsApp... I mean it could be worse, it could be Messenger LMAO.
I was shocked when I read around here in Lemmy that people chat with SMS on Android those haven't been used here since 2012 at least!
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People are stupid and don't care. I doubt many people here on lemmy are using them but there is always gonna be some using those mentioned, Instagram, or any of facebooks 'services'.
No. WhatsApp was well established before Facebook got involved.
This is snobbish and elitist. The evidence of this thread alone is that people who interact with this instance or use Lemmy generally also use Whatsapp. For many, it is convenient, relatively secure and private, and free. It engrained itself as the default communications platform in many countries, and Meta ownership doesn't have any tangible impact on its use for anybody, so far as I can tell. The "people are stupid" line is just ignorant bollocks.
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I despise anything Facebook, Meta. Zuck. But with shitty internet, WhatsApp is the only thing that works. If they put ads, I am gone from it.
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As someone in the Netherlands who has to use it and really doesn’t want to, I sure hope this motivates to Dutch to stop using this stupid app as the defacto texting platform.
That's why I'll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.
Sure, it's an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it's also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn't controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).
I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won't be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.
WhatsApp claims to be E2E/not readable by Facebook and to my knowledge, all we have to the contrary is speculation provided you verify the keys on both ends (same as Signal). Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal. I’d still 100% trust Signal over WhatsApp given Facebook’s massive conflict of interest, but SMS has been known-bad and collected by the NSA for a decade now. US telecommunications companies also have a terrible reputation for privacy. The only advantage it has over any other platform is portability between providers but even that falls to the side since you can have multiple messaging apps at once.
Facebook might know who you’re messaging but that’s also true for Signal.
Signal’s sealed sender does a good job at knowing you’re sending a message, but not who to. All it’ll know on the receiving end is that a message was sent to it.
Of course people have found other methods of identifying this but sealed sender does cover most of the low hanging fruit.
Signal does also purposefully attempt to find ways to not collect any metadata, whilst also making it more difficult for anyone attacking to the servers to find anything. (e.g. ORAM for Secure Enclave operations)
My understanding is that meta used E2EE on your messages themselves, but everything else is up for grabs.
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They won't. Most people just don't care at all unfortunately :(
"Privacy conscious WhatsApp users" 😂 My sides.
WhatsApp could flip on ads right now, right in the middle of messages and the majority wouldn't switch.
They put ads in I'm switching. People can send me SMS for all I care
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YES PLEASE BRING ADS. It will be one more reason to convince people to get off the platform.
The day that happens I can hopefully uninstall this thing already. Most of my friends use it, they're really big here in Europe. Pretty hard to move to another app.
If that doesn't convince your friends, nothing will.
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For the people who suggest users just change apps. Imagine I just ban all your current forms of text communication (you can still have e-mail), but only you, your family and friends will keep their ecosystems. Do you care you won't talk to them anymore? Can you convince them to use a new app? Does it affect your life beyond social interactions? Is it worth making your life harder?
Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it's a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn't be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.
I can't speak for everybody obviously but from what I've noticed people around here aren't overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn't really matter, you use what you need. There's nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be a hard switch all at once.
There's no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn't whether it's opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
I will let Moxie answer that: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
WhatsApp might still deploy ads on the platform alongside the app’s Instagram Stories-like Status feature, company head Will Cathcart recently said in an interview.
As pointed out by TechCrunch, Cathcart stated that WhatsApp ads could show up in different places within the app, including the newer Channels feature and statuses, though no timeline was provided for the change.
In the Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the interviewer asked Cathcart if WhatsApp would continue to be free and without ads.
Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the “messaging experience.” Cathcart also added that Channels could charge people to subscribe, and the owners could promote ads for it within Channels.
The Meta-owned messaging app has looked for ways to plaster ads in the app starting as early as 2018, when the company (then known as Facebook) looked to put ads in the Status feature.
However, in 2020, it seemed there was some internal fear about flipping the switch on ads and how privacy-focused users would react, so the delay continued, but plans for ads in the feature remained on the docket.
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Good bot
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It's trying its best ok
One more program to delete.
Isnt the EU working on something requiring Whatsapp to open up cross messaging for Signal and co.? If they do, there is no reason to be on wa anymore.
No I think they're pushing for RCS, that SMS successor thing that's supposed to be a standard on Android phones (which it is, only caveat for now is you can only use the Samsung and Google Messages app), but Apple is the only one not using it. I believe they did manage to force Apple to get working on ditching iMessage for RCS by mid-2024.
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boooooo
Ugh and I just got my dad to use it instead of SMS
(No he will not use Signal)
Delete your WhatsApp, block your SMS and if he wants to talk with you, he will use Signal.
Maybe he will switch even quicker if you punch him or pull his teeth out.
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