All these (ad)ons always take priority over performance.
Am I the only one who doesn’t want any, “do everything,” apps? I’d rather have 10 apps that each do one thing really well than have one app that haphazardly attempts to do 10 things.
At some point we’re just back to building web browsers with spyware built in.
Sooner or later there will be an API to build your own apps and systems. Then we just rebuild a webbrower, but made it worse
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
Unix philosophy. 50 years old idea. Imo devs would love to work that way but they are never the ones making decisions. And every CEO wants to have the new everything app ala wechat.
I see you are rebelling against Web 2.0, where you only need 3-4 apps or sites to do everything! Don’t be afraid. The old days of dozens of sites is gone and now the oligarchy of megacorps will take care of you with your 2-3 apps. You’ll have fewer apps that could go wrong and you’ll ever need to keep up with your 1-2 apps! Eventually the FTC will see the error of their ways and your One App will truly simplify your life!
I already have a “do everything” app.
It is called the Operating System.
It sounds to me like they’re trying to go like Wechat did
If I want to shop for something online, I’ll go to a website like Amazon.
If I want to transfer money online, I’ll go to a website like PayPal.
I don’t like the monopolizing those companies are doing, but they’re at least more transparent than doing it through a chat app. Can you even do returns for chat app purchases? I did a return with Amazon the other day and they just credited my account. They didn’t even ask for the book (I accidentally bought 2 copies) back.
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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.
The rabid duopolist that doesn’t even allow users to install whatever apps they want on their devices? The one that doesn’t even allow alternative browser engines? The one that outright refuses to use any and all open standards or to allow interoperability unless forced by governments? They might be one the worst companies in the world to do it.
Yeah. Apple basically has a captive market. Not to the extent of WeChat, but more than other western players.
The fact that Apple makes their money (mostly) on hardware sales, subscriptions, and their big-ass cut of App Store sales, instead of advertising like Google and Facebook, is why they are not likely to pull this crap in the near future. They don’t need to.
The online advertising ship is sinking, and Facebook is a rat desperately trying to find a way off.
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)
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
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.
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.
Matrix with Bridges does help a lot, though. Alternatively Beeper. (Which is Matrix with Bridges)
This is pretty much the only thing stopping me from using another app
Imagine being required to have the same app as your friend to send a message.
Then get them on a different app. Be a leader not a follower
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
All hail the European union
Wire…?
Wire has pretty much proven it’ll never gain traction.
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.
“Enshitification”
a new word added to my. dictionary
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.
Good. Keep cluttering the app until people move to simpler alternatives. Preferably libre.
Whatsapp turning into WeChat should make Signal and Threema look even better.
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.
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.
The software enshittification cycle continues.
pls whatsapp stop copying from fucking telegram there should be a law to make it not possible this is killing competition
But ‘Stories’ are from IG, owned by Meta… so… we rather stay quiet on this occasion xdd
Stories are the Meta’s copy of snapchat.
Stories are the worst addition to Telegram. I hope Meta sue them and make them remove this feature :D
tg stories failed miserably due to being premium only tho
But I can use them just fine? Some customization options like expiration time are behind premium but it’s available for everyone.
I think it was premium only for a short while before version 10
…you still can’t publish stories without premium. I’ve only seen like one two stories so far (despite having hundreds of contacts and chats), and one of them is a telegram ad. Almost everyone gets surprised when they see the stories bubble at the top…
you can publish them (at least on iphone) without premium
first they copied it from snapchat (meta loves to copy from smaller alternatives to kill them) second they added it only people where continuing to ask them for it (me too)
I stick to Telegram. I don’t want anything to do with Meta.
I stick to matrix. I want nothing to do with telegram.
I stick to XMPP. I would not mind being on Matrix but XMPP is much less bloated on my server.
I stick to pigeons.
That’s neither of OSI Layers lol
Then Telegram do something bad or stupid (it already started to) and you’ll have to transfer all your friends again…
That’s still better than using Meta:)
By choosing the lesser evil it is only getting bigger.
I was recently in Brazil and it amazes me how the country adopted the platform. You can do everything in it. And it’s not that you’re always talking to someone on the other side. It’s all automated. Remember those gigantic labyrinths of menus you had to listen when calling a business? Now it’s all in WhatsApp, but with the advantage of being much faster to read. I asked for a service in a company, they gave me a protocol number. When I wanted to check on it, I just had to type the number on WhatsApp and it would tell me if it was ready. So, no need to develop GUI, sites, and so on. Everything is accessible through WhatsApp.
So, I understand why Meta rolled this out and started with Brazil.
In the end, it feels like we made full circle and we’re coming back to the Telnet era of doing business.
Awesome, maybe then I can get everyone I know to switch to a better platform.
Yep, when Meta bought it, I warned my group friend chats that the second they start trying to monetize it, I’m going to whine until they all switch to Signal. Guess it’s time to start nagging
