Comment by joe_mamba
13 hours ago
>The regional limit makes it pretty much useless.
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, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.
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
Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
Email has solved that problem already.
> It's not a technical problem
How do you do encryption?
A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.
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Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least
Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.
If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
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Without interoperability with the chat platform all the regular people are already using, that's always going to be an uphill battle.
I use Signal to communicate with other tech folks, but good luck convincing your dentist/doctor/etc to send reminders on signal instead of WhatsApp.
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Everybody says this until there’s an alternative.
There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
The alternatives suck.
WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).
Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.
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There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.
I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
>working on all devices makes it very nice.
Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.
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You realize that at the end of your sentence you've contradicted everything you've said from the start until that point, right?
Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.
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