10 ms·

> On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger I find i

> On the other hand, I think the long-term sequalae of the blue-green message is to push people to use stand-alone apps like WhatsApp and FB Messenger I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account. With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here.

spiderice 2y ago
I don’t think relying on Facebook for your entire countries messaging is considered “a solved problem”. Relying on any one company is bad. But Facebook might be just about the worst.
- tamirzb 2y ago
  It's a solved problem as in it's one single problem that is solved. I agree that WhatsApp is a really bad solution overall, just compared to iMessage it does solve the cross-platform issue. I would also by far prefer a more open solution, but between relying on Apple for your country's messaging to relying on Facebook, at least by relying on Facebook you have one less issue.
svachalek 2y ago
These are all available in the US but it sounds like you have the same problem we do. There are way too many of them and they aren't compatible.
- skrebbel 2y ago
  In most countries one of these is the one everybody uses, and it works on every phone. In the US, the country is split, mostly by economic class, between people on iMessage and “the rest”. I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation. You can buy a $50 phone and use the ubiquitous messaging app.
  - ripdog 2y ago
    I live in NZ, there's no standard here. It's damned annoying. I've heard that Facebook Messenger is the most popular, but I only know one person who uses it and I don't have an account myself.
  - xgl5k 2y ago
    In the US there is only iMessage and regular SMS. SMS is interoperable with iMessage. People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should. If you didn't grow up Gen Z you don't really understand. It's just another of the endless ways you can get bullied indirectly for being "poor" or "nerdy". Peer pressure is a real phenomenon, and there is a point here when that peer pressure is manufactured by the company itself to get people to buy their stuff.
  - drstewart 2y ago
    >I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation. Ah, so it's better to have a monopoly than not have a monopoly? Also, what are your thoughts on the "US situation" given that the US is suing Apple for having a monopoly (literally the headline of the article)? Sounds like the rest of the world. Can I ask why the rest of the world, particularly the EU, which is supposedly so "pro-consumer", isn't breaking up these monopolies held by billion dollar corporations in their countries?
    - xvector 2y ago
      1. The monopolies literally make no money - WhatsApp is run at cost and doesn't turn a profit. 2. You are not gonna have universal phone-number based messaging that is E2EE without a monopoly. Even RCS has monopolistic gateways. Decentralized/federated systems suck and don't easily work with phone numbers. 3. If you keep breaking up chat applications as soon as they reach a certain size, you're not helping consumers in any way. People use WhatsApp because it's good, reliable, and E2EE. Breaking it up provides literally no value to consumers.
Andrex 2y ago
I hope WhatsApp is the past and RCS is the future. Insane to me the amount of WhatsApp evangelism I read on this site. Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong? SMS/RCS are flawed but can be improved. Advocating instead for Meta-produced software is irresponsible and reckless IMO.
- jupp0r 2y ago
  RCS does not support any end to end encryption. Yes you can send end to end encrypted messages over it, same as over SMS, but it's not part of the protocol. I don't hope RCS is the future, I don't want my ISP or any intermediate party to read my text messages, thank you.
- lumb63 2y ago
  I hope a protocol that has built in E2E encryption is the future. RCS is dead on arrival without that.
  - Andrex 2y ago
    It's a shame there isn't a standards body Apple is working in right now to address this. See also: my penultimate sentence.
  - xvector 2y ago
    WhatsApp is literally built on the same protocol Signal uses. Signal engineers helped integrate it into WhatsApp.
- closeparen 2y ago
  Carriers are basically infinitely evil all the time. I'd much rather be at the mercy of a Silicon Valley company than an "open standard" that leaves anything up to the telecoms.
  - Andrex 2y ago
    I never thought I'd defend ISPs... (especially since an ISP destroyed my credit "on accident" 10 years ago) but there is no comparison to Facebook. ISP's list of evil acts: failing to update infrastructure, failing to protect against intrusions, general technical and customer service ineptitude, absolute fealty to state requests for information (both official and sometimes unofficial), hijacking web requests to inject ads, and adding surprise undisclosed fees on a seemingly-random basis. Facebook's: Where to even start. Burying internal research directly linking Instagram to teen suicides (including a majority of teens surveyed saying they wish Instagram didn't exist even though they use it 5+_hours a day). Running nonconsensual psyop experiments on unsuspecting users and measuring their emotional responses like unpaid guinnea pigs (in fact, because of Facebook's revenue model, it was like users were paying Facebook for the privelege!) Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 election. Straight up lying about Facebook Video view numbers (overstated by 60-80%!) to fraudulently entice advertisers and content creators, then covering up the lie for over a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metrics_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metric... It's like comparing a molotov cocktail to a dirty bomb. Yes, both are evil and bad, but we can tell there's a difference there, right? --- To go beyond list wars, it's also just a matter of scale. You can be a mini-Hitler but if you're in an empty room you're not going to do that much damage. If you're at the Superbowl, though... The largest US ISP is Comcast at about 30,000,000 subscribers. Facebook has 2,900,000,000 monthly active users. The sheer scale is also the problem. Scale gives them unfathomable power and access. It should make every non-Meta shareholder uncomfortable IMO. If there were only one mega-monopoly-ISP for the whole of the US, I'd feel similarly uncomfortable. But that isn't the case, in fact more ISPs seem to be starting up recently. Put another way: An evil act from an ISP would hurt X number of people. An evil act from Facebook would hurt X^5 people. And I believe Facebook's acts are in general more evil than an ISPs.
oezi 2y ago
> WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram These are not good options to have secure and private communication. Signal and Threema should be the choices given.
- fsflover 2y ago
  Also Matrix.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  It's interesting that two actually secure apps were missing from that list
- greiskul 2y ago
  What's wrong with WhatsApp end to end encryption?
  - tcfhgj 2y ago
    Closed source means trust me bro
  - jwr 2y ago
    Read the small print. Your messages are encrypted, but you are syncing your entire contacts list (phone book) to FB/Meta.
mettamage 2y ago
Except for all the US people that keep in touch with Europeans! Source: me (a European) that has a GF in the US. They all get converted to WhatsApp :')
rkagerer 2y ago
Could also say it was 'solved' 30 years ago with ICQ (OK, I know it was centralized and insecure, but from a strictly user-experience perspective I honestly liked it better than anything that came since) or maybe 35 years ago with IRC.
- romeoblade 2y ago
  I miss ICQ, I still remember my number. It was my first instant messenger and even after MSN IM and Yahoo IM got big I still preferred chats on ICQ.
rootusrootus 2y ago
> I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple. > With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here. I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features. I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.
- sevagh 2y ago
  >The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. You are literally the caricature the OP is railing against. "How gullible are Americans that they think Apple invented messaging?" two posts down "I'm not gonna use Europoor trash, only iMessage or bust"
  - nonseqshitter 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - rootusrootus 2y ago
    I've been using the Internet since the 80s, I've seen every possible incarnation of instant messaging. I have no illusions of Apple inventing messaging. And it's pretty rude of you to resort to namecalling just because you disagree.
- nonseqshitter 2y ago
  I don’t know if iMessage makes for an antitrust claim. But you are absolutely right: it covers the majority of my friends and family, and for folks that use Android everything still works well enough. Why would I ever want 6 messaging apps instead of using the default?
jbm 2y ago
I can't speak for everything else, but LINE was not well known for privacy. Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them. I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.
vishnugupta 2y ago
> Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account. It's the same with payment system. I hear that bank to bank transfer is still a big pain in the US and that check payment is prevalent there.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It's not really a "big" pain these days, but it was definitely a problem more annoying than it should have been for much longer than it needed to be. The main problem as you can guess, is that US transfers are either fast and relatively expensive, or free/cheap and takes a few days. Ofc in this case Musk "solves" this problem as Venmo is one of the most popular solutions, as a spinoff of Paypal. just what we needed, to turn our financial transfers into social media. Zelle is a much better solution nearly identical to what a bank to bank transfer is, but it's not quite as prevalent.
jwr 2y ago
What I find amusing is that all of those WhatsApp users don't know or don't care that they are uploading their entire list of contacts (with phone numbers) to Meta/Facebook and syncing it every day. That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway. WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.
averageRoyalty 2y ago
> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here. I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.

spiderice 2y ago

I don’t think relying on Facebook for your entire countries messaging is considered “a solved problem”. Relying on any one company is bad. But Facebook might be just about the worst.

tamirzb 2y ago
It's a solved problem as in it's one single problem that is solved. I agree that WhatsApp is a really bad solution overall, just compared to iMessage it does solve the cross-platform issue. I would also by far prefer a more open solution, but between relying on Apple for your country's messaging to relying on Facebook, at least by relying on Facebook you have one less issue.

svachalek 2y ago

These are all available in the US but it sounds like you have the same problem we do. There are way too many of them and they aren't compatible.

skrebbel 2y ago
In most countries one of these is the one everybody uses, and it works on every phone. In the US, the country is split, mostly by economic class, between people on iMessage and “the rest”. I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation. You can buy a $50 phone and use the ubiquitous messaging app.
- ripdog 2y ago
  I live in NZ, there's no standard here. It's damned annoying. I've heard that Facebook Messenger is the most popular, but I only know one person who uses it and I don't have an account myself.
- xgl5k 2y ago
  In the US there is only iMessage and regular SMS. SMS is interoperable with iMessage. People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >People are just making a much bigger deal about the green bubbles than they should. If you didn't grow up Gen Z you don't really understand. It's just another of the endless ways you can get bullied indirectly for being "poor" or "nerdy". Peer pressure is a real phenomenon, and there is a point here when that peer pressure is manufactured by the company itself to get people to buy their stuff.
- drstewart 2y ago
  >I’m not saying “whatsapp is effectively a monopoly in $country” is great, but it’s better than the US situation. Ah, so it's better to have a monopoly than not have a monopoly? Also, what are your thoughts on the "US situation" given that the US is suing Apple for having a monopoly (literally the headline of the article)? Sounds like the rest of the world. Can I ask why the rest of the world, particularly the EU, which is supposedly so "pro-consumer", isn't breaking up these monopolies held by billion dollar corporations in their countries?
  - xvector 2y ago
    1. The monopolies literally make no money - WhatsApp is run at cost and doesn't turn a profit. 2. You are not gonna have universal phone-number based messaging that is E2EE without a monopoly. Even RCS has monopolistic gateways. Decentralized/federated systems suck and don't easily work with phone numbers. 3. If you keep breaking up chat applications as soon as they reach a certain size, you're not helping consumers in any way. People use WhatsApp because it's good, reliable, and E2EE. Breaking it up provides literally no value to consumers.

Andrex 2y ago

I hope WhatsApp is the past and RCS is the future. Insane to me the amount of WhatsApp evangelism I read on this site. Sure, let's trade international protocols for Zuckerware. What could go wrong? SMS/RCS are flawed but can be improved. Advocating instead for Meta-produced software is irresponsible and reckless IMO.

jupp0r 2y ago
RCS does not support any end to end encryption. Yes you can send end to end encrypted messages over it, same as over SMS, but it's not part of the protocol. I don't hope RCS is the future, I don't want my ISP or any intermediate party to read my text messages, thank you.
lumb63 2y ago
I hope a protocol that has built in E2E encryption is the future. RCS is dead on arrival without that.
- Andrex 2y ago
  It's a shame there isn't a standards body Apple is working in right now to address this. See also: my penultimate sentence.
- xvector 2y ago
  WhatsApp is literally built on the same protocol Signal uses. Signal engineers helped integrate it into WhatsApp.
closeparen 2y ago
Carriers are basically infinitely evil all the time. I'd much rather be at the mercy of a Silicon Valley company than an "open standard" that leaves anything up to the telecoms.
- Andrex 2y ago
  I never thought I'd defend ISPs... (especially since an ISP destroyed my credit "on accident" 10 years ago) but there is no comparison to Facebook. ISP's list of evil acts: failing to update infrastructure, failing to protect against intrusions, general technical and customer service ineptitude, absolute fealty to state requests for information (both official and sometimes unofficial), hijacking web requests to inject ads, and adding surprise undisclosed fees on a seemingly-random basis. Facebook's: Where to even start. Burying internal research directly linking Instagram to teen suicides (including a majority of teens surveyed saying they wish Instagram didn't exist even though they use it 5+_hours a day). Running nonconsensual psyop experiments on unsuspecting users and measuring their emotional responses like unpaid guinnea pigs (in fact, because of Facebook's revenue model, it was like users were paying Facebook for the privelege!) Cambridge Analytica and the 2016 election. Straight up lying about Facebook Video view numbers (overstated by 60-80%!) to fraudulently entice advertisers and content creators, then covering up the lie for over a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metrics_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video#Facebook_metric... It's like comparing a molotov cocktail to a dirty bomb. Yes, both are evil and bad, but we can tell there's a difference there, right? --- To go beyond list wars, it's also just a matter of scale. You can be a mini-Hitler but if you're in an empty room you're not going to do that much damage. If you're at the Superbowl, though... The largest US ISP is Comcast at about 30,000,000 subscribers. Facebook has 2,900,000,000 monthly active users. The sheer scale is also the problem. Scale gives them unfathomable power and access. It should make every non-Meta shareholder uncomfortable IMO. If there were only one mega-monopoly-ISP for the whole of the US, I'd feel similarly uncomfortable. But that isn't the case, in fact more ISPs seem to be starting up recently. Put another way: An evil act from an ISP would hurt X number of people. An evil act from Facebook would hurt X^5 people. And I believe Facebook's acts are in general more evil than an ISPs.

oezi 2y ago

> WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram These are not good options to have secure and private communication. Signal and Threema should be the choices given.

fsflover 2y ago
Also Matrix.
barbazoo 2y ago
It's interesting that two actually secure apps were missing from that list
greiskul 2y ago
What's wrong with WhatsApp end to end encryption?
- tcfhgj 2y ago
  Closed source means trust me bro
- jwr 2y ago
  Read the small print. Your messages are encrypted, but you are syncing your entire contacts list (phone book) to FB/Meta.

mettamage 2y ago

Except for all the US people that keep in touch with Europeans! Source: me (a European) that has a GF in the US. They all get converted to WhatsApp :')

rkagerer 2y ago

Could also say it was 'solved' 30 years ago with ICQ (OK, I know it was centralized and insecure, but from a strictly user-experience perspective I honestly liked it better than anything that came since) or maybe 35 years ago with IRC.

romeoblade 2y ago
I miss ICQ, I still remember my number. It was my first instant messenger and even after MSN IM and Yahoo IM got big I still preferred chats on ICQ.

rootusrootus 2y ago

> I find it amusing that in 2024 people in the US still talk about WhatsApp as a future step. One person said that. Almost nobody I know has any interest in WhatsApp. The infatuation with putting all of your messaging into Facebook's hands is a European thing. What I don't understand at all is why Europeans think Facebook is superior to Apple. > With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here. I have a hard time believing that having multiple chat apps is any kind of solution to the problem. The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. Right out of the box, no asking what ecosystem someone else is using, it just works. And if I'm talking to someone who does not have iMessage ... it still just works, albeit with fewer features. I heartily disagree that Europe or the rest of the world has a better system. Best would be if every phone from every manufacturer supported a modern protocol equivalent to iMessage or Google's proprietary RCS. Until then, iMessage in the US is the closest things to universal modern messaging.

sevagh 2y ago
>The nice thing about iMessage in the US is that it covers about 90% of everyone I talk to. You are literally the caricature the OP is railing against. "How gullible are Americans that they think Apple invented messaging?" two posts down "I'm not gonna use Europoor trash, only iMessage or bust"
- nonseqshitter 2y ago
  [flagged]
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  I've been using the Internet since the 80s, I've seen every possible incarnation of instant messaging. I have no illusions of Apple inventing messaging. And it's pretty rude of you to resort to namecalling just because you disagree.
nonseqshitter 2y ago
I don’t know if iMessage makes for an antitrust claim. But you are absolutely right: it covers the majority of my friends and family, and for folks that use Android everything still works well enough. Why would I ever want 6 messaging apps instead of using the default?

jbm 2y ago

I can't speak for everything else, but LINE was not well known for privacy. Everything people complain about WRT Meta was being done with impunity; their privacy policy basically said that they could read your messages and tailor ads based on them. I really don't understand why people are crowing about using platforms like LINE and WhatsApp and sneering at Americans; they are not better.

vishnugupta 2y ago

> Where I'm from already 10+ years ago every single person you know would have a WhatsApp account. It's the same with payment system. I hear that bank to bank transfer is still a big pain in the US and that check payment is prevalent there.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's not really a "big" pain these days, but it was definitely a problem more annoying than it should have been for much longer than it needed to be. The main problem as you can guess, is that US transfers are either fast and relatively expensive, or free/cheap and takes a few days. Ofc in this case Musk "solves" this problem as Venmo is one of the most popular solutions, as a spinoff of Paypal. just what we needed, to turn our financial transfers into social media. Zelle is a much better solution nearly identical to what a bank to bank transfer is, but it's not quite as prevalent.

jwr 2y ago

What I find amusing is that all of those WhatsApp users don't know or don't care that they are uploading their entire list of contacts (with phone numbers) to Meta/Facebook and syncing it every day. That "end-to-end encrypted" advertising has done its job, and most people don't want to be bothered with thinking too much anyway. WhatsApp is a gold mine of real-world social graph data for Facebook/Meta. If you think for a moment how much you can infer by merging that data with other information you get from people using other FB apps and sites, it's incredible.

averageRoyalty 2y ago

> With WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, Telegram etc. I think this is pretty much a solved problem in the rest of the world, really only the US is behind here. I don't think this is accurate. In ANZ at least it's fairly uncommon, and I'd imagine there are a number of other similar countries. I would be surprised if the number isn't 100m+ first world users who don't fall into that bucket, not including the US.