Comment by digiown
12 hours ago
I was intending that the alternate client should exist to function as an escape hatch. I fully expect most people will still use the default one, just like how people used the official reddit/telegram client when third party ones were available. The existence of an alternative constrains how much Facebook can enshittify the experience.
E2EE is about secure transport between the endpoints. What happens to the message after the endpoint is not something an app can feasibly enforce. Having control of the clients can at most do things like enforcing deletes, which IMO is not a good idea anyway.
> every second client was pretty much a spyware
Very few people will actually use one since the official app won't be outwardly too hostile, and those who do should be sufficiently discerning.
I don't think that it can work like that. If you make it fully open, you don't know what can happen. It cannot improve the security, it can only worsen it.
Suddenly you go from people using WhatsApp to people using random apps that you have no idea about, I think it's a step backward.
The "escape hatch", IMO, is an alternative messenger (like Signal). If Meta makes WhatsApp really bad, people can just switch to Signal. It's infinitely easier than moving away from AWS or the Microsoft Suite. The lock-in effect is really just that people can't be arsed to install it.
I think that the mere existence of Signal already forces Meta to keep WhatsApp relatively good. And to be fair, around me people like WhatsApp better because it has features they want and that Signal doesn't have.