Comment by mcjiggerlog

Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.

> SMS

Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp

SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.

Yeah I hate SMS. I don't want my carrier to be involved in the content of my communications. Also I normally use the computer when at home, no point using a tiny mobile device obviously.

I don't use Google or Apple accounts either so RCS is out too. WhatsApp is meta now unfortunately but for historical reasons there's no avoiding it here.

I use WhatsApp and Telegram pretty much exclusively (telegram more for group chats)

> I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.

I live in one such country, and indeed, the bulk of my usage is to coordinate with local groups based in the same city.

But tend to meet many people from the US who don't live here, and they all straight up ask for my whatsapp.

I'm also a heavy telegram and signal user, and can't recall a single instance of anybody mentioning these.

Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.

It's not a technical problem. It's a political one

Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.

It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family

> Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps

Are you on some funny medication or something? ROTFL.

> Not everyone has overseas contacts

It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.

Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?

We live in a global world and this is super common nowadays. In my own family 2 out of 3 sibling are married with someone who was born in a different continent, one in Asia, the other in Latin America.

And we both met them here in Europe.

People are so welcoming in latin america that when you marry someone, you literally marry the whole extended family. After just a handful of years is not like my partner's aunts and cousins are strangers to me. I can contact them anytime for advice on a topic related to their work/career field and they will do so about mine.

Add to that some cousins and friends who moved overseas and I have many regular contacts that live more than 10000km away from me.

"on your own Continent" != "in the EU."

Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.

It's because the real solution here is to move away from this proprietary malware to protocols that are open, so that anyone can write or fork a client. (For instance, see Molly for a fully Ungoogled Signal.)

It's difficult when it comes to messengers, but reasonably easy when it comes to Google and Android, for which good alternatives exist (e.g., DuckDuck on GrapheneOS.)

> Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.

This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.

And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.

Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?

That doesn't make sense -- the parties to the conversation already _have_ the messages.

Spam prevention is a likely angle, however. EU should force it to be opt-out, not opt-in -- probably what people want anyway.

Is this a per-contact setting or a "universal" one?

Is it auto enabled on eu phones? If not, to ne it's not compliant

WhatsApp is a bizarre name, and I think that contributes to it occupying a "lower rent" space than the others (the goofy chat background also helps). But I think most people ultimately gloss over the joke and it just becomes kind of abstract.

With BirdyChat though, it feels like you'll be confronted by its silliness in perpetuity.

old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number. whataspp discloses name, picture, status

As for your second comment, updated first comment with:

I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant if that app is European. They do not have my permission to have my private data, and GDPR does not allow whatAspp to hand it over without my permission either...