Comment by NayamAmarshe
1 year ago
> I still use WhatsApp though as that is the biggest communication app outside China in Asia
This is still contributing to their monopoly. WhatsApp's monopoly is growing and they've even blatantly started to copy the competition: Telegram.
Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place.
> Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place.
Of course it does. It does spread the word. That’s important.
You can be an activist and have a real life. You can despise Meta but have acquaintances on WhatsApp you can’t or don’t want to move. You can be an anticapitalist and still agree to join a group of friends inviting you to McDonalds. You can be an ecologist and have a car because you live somewhere without car free infrastructures.
You have the right to be critical of your own life while still acknowledging you can’t control everything.
Having WhatsApp may be wrong for you but it may be less wrong than leaving your friends groups.
> Having WhatsApp may be wrong for you but it may be less wrong than leaving your friends groups.
If friends can't install another app to talk to you, maybe they don't really wanna keep in touch.
When I moved to Telegram I told family and friends where I'd be and they all installed Telegram and actually liked it so they stayed.
It's been 3 years now and I haven't touched WhatsApp.
My words have no value if I can't even follow them. Cognitive dissonance comes cheap, but we can all try to be a bit better than that.
> If friends can't install another app to talk to you, maybe they don't really wanna keep in touch.
Interestingly, your assumption works the other way too : If you can't install another app (one you don't want), maybe you don't really wanna keep in touch.
I prefer to see it from the other side : I value my friend more than which app they want to use. I do encourage my friends to use Signal but I can't force them.
> When I moved to Telegram I told family and friends where I'd be and they all installed Telegram and actually liked it so they stayed.
Same. And now I realize that Telegram is just a little less shitty than WhatsApp and that it doesn't even do E2E by default and I have no more willpower to migrate everyone on Signal.
> It's been 3 years now and I haven't touched WhatsApp.
Looks like you weren't as pure as me 3 years ago since I never touched WhatsApp until 3 months ago. And you know why ? I've been integrated into a new group of friends which was on WhatsApp. The thing is, making your current friends migrate to another app is difficult. But you can't know where your future friends will be and you will not be able to make them use your app and making new friendships is hard enough in life that I'm not going to filter them by the app they use.
Oh and I have the magic power to be able to use the 3 apps on my phone ! And with Beeper, it's now a superpower.
Anyway, FWIW, I find this messaging apps situation totally pathetic. If it was me, we should all be using an open and decentralized messaging protocol where everybody can own its own data. But since I can't convince all my friends to reach me via e-mail or Matrix, I will suffer the shitty apps and will do my best to use Signal as much as possible (but Signal is shitty in my eyes too since it's centralized).