As Seirdy notes:
It just keeps getting more relevant. WhatsApp, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit…each disaster worse than the last. The companies in charge know that the users will just take it after having their autonomy taken first.
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Good article - but as it points out I am entirely powerless. I can’t move away from WhatsApp as everyone, absolutely everyone I know (in the UK at least) uses WhatsApp as their primary or only messaging app/service.
Absolutely agree. WhatsApp is the default in my country and all across Europe. For instance, I was on holiday earlier this month and the hotel I was staying in just contacted me through WhatsApp with check-in info. They hadn’t replied to earlier emails but defaulted straight to WhatsApp for communication. It would be a nightmare to move away from it at this point. At least it still doesn’t feel like a Meta app.
You can, it’ll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Asia is like Line, and maybe some other Chinese apps that I will never install.
The interesting part is, email is still working fine as alternative. I didn’t install any other message app cause email and whatever next iteration of gchat for me is enough. ( I will probably slowly migrate to proton email and some 3rd party cloud storage hosting instead of just use gmail and google drive for photos.)
But yeah, for the less tech oriented population, overcome the hurdle of use different app is really huge obstacles. (Like my mom still tries to share things with me through Line app, even though I teach her how to use email a couple times. it made search for older shares much easier.)
This is where I’m at with Discord :/
I wish i do not have to use Whatsapp. Unfortunately, i have to for business purposes, as i am in part of the world where Whatsapp is the main chat app that everyone uses.
Fortunately i have two phones (personal and business), so Whatsapp is only on the business phone.
seems like a lot of revisionist bullshit in this rant, eg:
WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters
WhatsApp rose because:
a) If was free
b) it used data vs sms/mms which was becoming cheaper
c) it was cross platform at the time (blackberry, android, nokia, etc)
d) It used your existing phone number as your identifier, so onboarding and finding existing contacts was swift
