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It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. That is a true lack of choice. If it were just FB, fine, ignore it, don't use it, use Whatsapp. Bu

It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. That is a true lack of choice. If it were just FB, fine, ignore it, don't use it, use Whatsapp. But no, they get to buy up competition whilst telling us how much our privacy and integrity is taken seriously

fredley 7y ago
Facebook and Insta I can (and do!) live without. Whatsapp though, is the main method of communication, and particularly group communication for all of my friends. It's almost impossible to leave.
- dadarepublic 7y ago
  I empathize. It's the same situation in reverse for many people. The social networks I'm on is where my friends and/or fam are at. It becomes very hard to leave once you've imprinted your social network onto a social network platform. A very common situation.
- aloukissas 7y ago
  I've converted most of my friends to Signal. Easy switch. [edit] The native desktop app is even better than WhatsApp's (doesn't stream data from your phone).
  - vonquant 7y ago
    I'd say you were a lucky one. Persuading my contacts to move and explaining my rationale has been a long, arduous and still not quite complete process. People seem to struggle with envisaging how a lack of privacy will harm them personally.
  - h4waii 7y ago
    I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage. Group chats are also fairly decent on Signal, I just wish there was a way for an "admin" to exist to moderate users in the group.
    - johnchristopher 7y ago
      > I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage. Except my friend's gf could never really see when messages were using data or SMS. And my friend put a stop to the experiment because the linux client was leaking RAM like a dam and we both had sync problems between the phone and the desktop client (we are both huge telegram users for the smooth experience when connecting to your account and for syncing. We both despise the privacy risks though).
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  I don't use any of them, but I've been trying to keep in touch with an old friend of mine who's serving with the Canadian Armed Forces in Ukraine and we often miss each other's emails. He's had to adopt a local SIM card over there for security purposes (Russia's listening) and uses WhatsApp regularly. He asked me to pick it up, and instead I referred him to Signal. This was [part of] his recent response: I downloaded signal but they want to confirm my number but my sim card doesnt work over here and my european card is data only. So that is one blocker for sure but otherwise I always push people to Signal as a reasonable alternative.
  - quindecagon 7y ago
    Apparently if SMS verification fails, it can fall back to a phone call where a robot reads you the verification code. This means you could set up Signal with a landline, Google Voice, Skype, or Twilio. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-phone-number/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-p...
    - newscracker 7y ago
      Just make sure you don’t lose access to that number. Or you’ll find yourself locked out of Signal completely if someone else verifies an account using that number.
- kashyapc 7y ago
  One approach that helped me convert some of my non-tech friends to Signal Messenger is by calmly focusing on the long term aspect -- "Think about it, you'd be using these tools for the next 40+ years. A small inconvenience for a few months will give more power to you in the long term." And then I stop. I let them take time to decide; don't insist.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    On iOS it’s not a small inconvenience to use Signal. For several years now, Signal has prohibited backing up chats. So if you switch phones or get a new phone or lose your phone, all your previous chats are permanently lost. Even re-joining the chat groups you were a part of requires more work, and after that there are issues in not seeing the group name, the members and related things. Signal is just ok as an ephemeral messenger, but it’s not a solution or a replacement of any kind for the other messaging platforms that work as one would expect them to and provide key features that lay people appreciate. Going by the pace of development, my view is that it’ll be a good enough alternative in a decade. There are also other basic issues with Signal (message deliverability, buggy and spurious “device number changed” notifications, etc.). Note that I do use Signal and advocate it, but I do that with only certain people so that I don’t burn my personal “relationship capital” unnecessarily with a poor solution.
- tudelo 7y ago
  I wonder if its possible to mirror messaging apps in some way... like to use messenger/whatsapp/{insert better app here} as 'clients' and sync messages in a non annoying way (of course, im sure this would be actively undermined)
- shreyshrey 7y ago
  Try AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io). We use it for group communication both for personal and professional use. It is private. Create a channel and invite your friends. Thats it. Disclaimer: I work for them.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    I had a very quick look. How is this different from Slack and how does it avoid the incessant notifications/interruptions/noise problem in Slack and similar platforms?
    - shreyshrey 7y ago
      AirSend is custom built to address communication use case cases across organization boundaries. For instance, you don’t need to switch across workspaces to communicate with different parties. Unlike Slack It also provides the file context and task context in the same conversation space. With respect to interruptions/noise it doesn’t have any advantages over Slack.
enumjorge 7y ago
It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that poses a serious threat? I don’t know how capitalism self heals from that.
- druddha 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
- conception 7y ago
  Capitalism isn't all about choice and competition. Free Markets are. Capitalism is about the means of production being held in private hands - but those private hands still do their best to own all of the means of production and to lock out potential competitors. The two get conflated (free markets and capitalism) but they are different beasts. In fact, you can have a free market socialism (tried semi-successfully by Yugoslavia). But ensuring free markets via regulation is how to keep Capitalism from becoming a Gibson novel.
  - haolez 7y ago
    Free market socialism? How would information about value be propagated? That's usually done via prices and money.
    - thiagoharry 7y ago
      Some options: a) Also using competition, prices and money, but with factories, companies and lands organized by worker's cooperatives, with the profit shared according with some logic not based in mere property. b) Using only prices and money while keeping updated data about production and consumption, and updating prices based in these data. Perhaps easier with modern technology than in the past. The information about these things can propagate in wires and communication means like the other kind of information that the society needs.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
>It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. The public probably is not able or willing to pay for extremely valuable instant global communications service that handles audio, video, photo, text, and other data. Regardless of who owns it, I know that my network of people across 4 continents derives great value from the free service.
- pjc50 7y ago
  WhatsApp was monetized before it was bought, although I can't remember exactly how.
  - Jagat 7y ago
    They used to charge $1 per year after the first year
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I know they said that, but I don't know anyone who actually had to pay it.
      - bromuro 7y ago
        I paid it! I hoped for that model to win :(
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Me too, they even advertised they charge $1 so that they will never have to sell or compromise your privacy. Of course, that promise is worth less than $20B as we found out.
        Jagat 7y ago
        Everyone knew that was going away the moment they sold the app that had 1 billion users for 19 billion dollars. The founders were being disingenuous when they said the data wouldn't be used for ads.
rapnie 7y ago
I would love to move to Signal and send anyone reaching out to me on Whatsapp an auto-reply with a Signal invite. Couldn't find how to achieve that. Anyone knowing if this is possible?
- fredley 7y ago
  It'd be possible, I think. You'd need to run WhatsApp web, which is an Electron app. Get into the dev tools and set it up directly from the JS console.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    That's a nice idea if it works, bit hacky but still. I never used WA Web, will have a look.
- warp 7y ago
  Facebook has an API for whatsapp, which I believe is a closed beta. In theory you could build an app to do this for you, twilio supports this and let's you use a development key even before you get into the beta. [I expect that's too many hoops for your use case though ;]
  - rapnie 7y ago
    Thx! I found the Business API which is really for partners ( and for SMB's there is the Business app). https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api The Twilio API is in beta, and you can sign up. Don't know what pricing will be, but maybe for individual use a dev subscription may be sufficient https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp Here is the API reference: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api
    - ignoramous 7y ago
      Also see: https://www.messagebird.com/en/ https://www.messagebird.com/en/ Though, getting your own business-API would be cheaper, I've heard WhatsApp is very picky about granting those and instead prefer you work with a third-party partner instead [0]. Then, there's click-to-chat for simpler communication if the client's WA number is known [1]. [0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000239/?category=5245246 https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000239/?category=52452... [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000030/?category=5245251 https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000030/?category=52452...
dnpp123 7y ago
For messaging, I highly encourage people to use matrix.org. For tech savvy people it's really easy to self-host https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and the good part is that you can set up bridges to telegram, whatsapp, facebook, irc, discord, slack... So you can use those apps privately while waiting for people to switch to better alternatives (which may never happens sadly). Bonus: the desktop app is a rather lightweight web app usable in browser, so goodbye RAM eating monsters like slack and discord.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  I tried, I really did. Got my close group of ~8 friends on the public Matrix server. People would miss messages because they only use Matrix for that one thing, and would forget to login/check/etc. That and a few choice little bugs pushed them back to FB messenger. That said, I'm hopeful for the future of the protocol.
  - dnpp123 7y ago
    Yes, things are still moving fast. AFAIK the final 1.0 version of the protocol spec was only released last Summer. The "I missed message because I only use xxx for that one thing" is valid for every app as long as you have fragmentation in the messaging space I think. That's why I like the idea of using the same client for a multitude of services through bridges, and not forcing people to necessarily use your network (even if they should :p)
    - edraferi 7y ago
      How do you deliver end-to-end encryption in a federated architecture like that?
      - dnpp123 7y ago
        You can peek at : https://matrix.org/docs/develop/ https://matrix.org/docs/develop/ tldr; similar to signal afaik The docs there for E2E are fairly old but get you an idea how it works. E2E has improved a lot in the last few months IMHO.
noncoml 7y ago
We brought it to ourselves by not being willing to pay for WhatsApp. WhatsApp before getting bought by FB was begging for money and is my understanding that it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Public had a choice of free(as in beer) products vs privacy. We chose the former.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  Whatsapp used to cost $1/year which covered operating costs (first year free).
  - Jommi 7y ago
    Not true, WhatsApp did have a pricing test where certain users were pushed to pay 1€/$ per year. It was never unilaterally enforced.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Is that what that was? I remember getting the app and wondering why no one I knew ever had to pay for it.
danfang 7y ago
Some alternatives to FB and WhatsApp exist - I’ve been working on an alternative social network called Thread (https://get.thread-app.com https://get.thread-app.com). Check it out! I’d also recommend services like Signal for secure, private messaging.

fredley 7y ago

Facebook and Insta I can (and do!) live without. Whatsapp though, is the main method of communication, and particularly group communication for all of my friends. It's almost impossible to leave.

dadarepublic 7y ago
I empathize. It's the same situation in reverse for many people. The social networks I'm on is where my friends and/or fam are at. It becomes very hard to leave once you've imprinted your social network onto a social network platform. A very common situation.
aloukissas 7y ago
I've converted most of my friends to Signal. Easy switch. [edit] The native desktop app is even better than WhatsApp's (doesn't stream data from your phone).
- vonquant 7y ago
  I'd say you were a lucky one. Persuading my contacts to move and explaining my rationale has been a long, arduous and still not quite complete process. People seem to struggle with envisaging how a lack of privacy will harm them personally.
- h4waii 7y ago
  I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage. Group chats are also fairly decent on Signal, I just wish there was a way for an "admin" to exist to moderate users in the group.
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    > I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage. Except my friend's gf could never really see when messages were using data or SMS. And my friend put a stop to the experiment because the linux client was leaking RAM like a dam and we both had sync problems between the phone and the desktop client (we are both huge telegram users for the smooth experience when connecting to your account and for syncing. We both despise the privacy risks though).
52-6F-62 7y ago
I don't use any of them, but I've been trying to keep in touch with an old friend of mine who's serving with the Canadian Armed Forces in Ukraine and we often miss each other's emails. He's had to adopt a local SIM card over there for security purposes (Russia's listening) and uses WhatsApp regularly. He asked me to pick it up, and instead I referred him to Signal. This was [part of] his recent response: I downloaded signal but they want to confirm my number but my sim card doesnt work over here and my european card is data only. So that is one blocker for sure but otherwise I always push people to Signal as a reasonable alternative.
- quindecagon 7y ago
  Apparently if SMS verification fails, it can fall back to a phone call where a robot reads you the verification code. This means you could set up Signal with a landline, Google Voice, Skype, or Twilio. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-phone-number/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-p...
  - newscracker 7y ago
    Just make sure you don’t lose access to that number. Or you’ll find yourself locked out of Signal completely if someone else verifies an account using that number.
kashyapc 7y ago
One approach that helped me convert some of my non-tech friends to Signal Messenger is by calmly focusing on the long term aspect -- "Think about it, you'd be using these tools for the next 40+ years. A small inconvenience for a few months will give more power to you in the long term." And then I stop. I let them take time to decide; don't insist.
- newscracker 7y ago
  On iOS it’s not a small inconvenience to use Signal. For several years now, Signal has prohibited backing up chats. So if you switch phones or get a new phone or lose your phone, all your previous chats are permanently lost. Even re-joining the chat groups you were a part of requires more work, and after that there are issues in not seeing the group name, the members and related things. Signal is just ok as an ephemeral messenger, but it’s not a solution or a replacement of any kind for the other messaging platforms that work as one would expect them to and provide key features that lay people appreciate. Going by the pace of development, my view is that it’ll be a good enough alternative in a decade. There are also other basic issues with Signal (message deliverability, buggy and spurious “device number changed” notifications, etc.). Note that I do use Signal and advocate it, but I do that with only certain people so that I don’t burn my personal “relationship capital” unnecessarily with a poor solution.
tudelo 7y ago
I wonder if its possible to mirror messaging apps in some way... like to use messenger/whatsapp/{insert better app here} as 'clients' and sync messages in a non annoying way (of course, im sure this would be actively undermined)
shreyshrey 7y ago
Try AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io). We use it for group communication both for personal and professional use. It is private. Create a channel and invite your friends. Thats it. Disclaimer: I work for them.
- newscracker 7y ago
  I had a very quick look. How is this different from Slack and how does it avoid the incessant notifications/interruptions/noise problem in Slack and similar platforms?
  - shreyshrey 7y ago
    AirSend is custom built to address communication use case cases across organization boundaries. For instance, you don’t need to switch across workspaces to communicate with different parties. Unlike Slack It also provides the file context and task context in the same conversation space. With respect to interruptions/noise it doesn’t have any advantages over Slack.

enumjorge 7y ago

It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that poses a serious threat? I don’t know how capitalism self heals from that.

druddha 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
conception 7y ago
Capitalism isn't all about choice and competition. Free Markets are. Capitalism is about the means of production being held in private hands - but those private hands still do their best to own all of the means of production and to lock out potential competitors. The two get conflated (free markets and capitalism) but they are different beasts. In fact, you can have a free market socialism (tried semi-successfully by Yugoslavia). But ensuring free markets via regulation is how to keep Capitalism from becoming a Gibson novel.
- haolez 7y ago
  Free market socialism? How would information about value be propagated? That's usually done via prices and money.
  - thiagoharry 7y ago
    Some options: a) Also using competition, prices and money, but with factories, companies and lands organized by worker's cooperatives, with the profit shared according with some logic not based in mere property. b) Using only prices and money while keeping updated data about production and consumption, and updating prices based in these data. Perhaps easier with modern technology than in the past. The information about these things can propagate in wires and communication means like the other kind of information that the society needs.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

>It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. The public probably is not able or willing to pay for extremely valuable instant global communications service that handles audio, video, photo, text, and other data. Regardless of who owns it, I know that my network of people across 4 continents derives great value from the free service.

pjc50 7y ago
WhatsApp was monetized before it was bought, although I can't remember exactly how.
- Jagat 7y ago
  They used to charge $1 per year after the first year
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I know they said that, but I don't know anyone who actually had to pay it.
    - bromuro 7y ago
      I paid it! I hoped for that model to win :(
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Me too, they even advertised they charge $1 so that they will never have to sell or compromise your privacy. Of course, that promise is worth less than $20B as we found out.
      - Jagat 7y ago
        Everyone knew that was going away the moment they sold the app that had 1 billion users for 19 billion dollars. The founders were being disingenuous when they said the data wouldn't be used for ads.

rapnie 7y ago

I would love to move to Signal and send anyone reaching out to me on Whatsapp an auto-reply with a Signal invite. Couldn't find how to achieve that. Anyone knowing if this is possible?

fredley 7y ago
It'd be possible, I think. You'd need to run WhatsApp web, which is an Electron app. Get into the dev tools and set it up directly from the JS console.
- rapnie 7y ago
  That's a nice idea if it works, bit hacky but still. I never used WA Web, will have a look.
warp 7y ago
Facebook has an API for whatsapp, which I believe is a closed beta. In theory you could build an app to do this for you, twilio supports this and let's you use a development key even before you get into the beta. [I expect that's too many hoops for your use case though ;]
- rapnie 7y ago
  Thx! I found the Business API which is really for partners ( and for SMB's there is the Business app). https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api The Twilio API is in beta, and you can sign up. Don't know what pricing will be, but maybe for individual use a dev subscription may be sufficient https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp Here is the API reference: https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api
  - ignoramous 7y ago
    Also see: https://www.messagebird.com/en/ https://www.messagebird.com/en/ Though, getting your own business-API would be cheaper, I've heard WhatsApp is very picky about granting those and instead prefer you work with a third-party partner instead [0]. Then, there's click-to-chat for simpler communication if the client's WA number is known [1]. [0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000239/?category=5245246 https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000239/?category=52452... [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000030/?category=5245251 https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/general/26000030/?category=52452...

dnpp123 7y ago

For messaging, I highly encourage people to use matrix.org. For tech savvy people it's really easy to self-host https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and the good part is that you can set up bridges to telegram, whatsapp, facebook, irc, discord, slack... So you can use those apps privately while waiting for people to switch to better alternatives (which may never happens sadly). Bonus: the desktop app is a rather lightweight web app usable in browser, so goodbye RAM eating monsters like slack and discord.

anderspitman 7y ago
I tried, I really did. Got my close group of ~8 friends on the public Matrix server. People would miss messages because they only use Matrix for that one thing, and would forget to login/check/etc. That and a few choice little bugs pushed them back to FB messenger. That said, I'm hopeful for the future of the protocol.
- dnpp123 7y ago
  Yes, things are still moving fast. AFAIK the final 1.0 version of the protocol spec was only released last Summer. The "I missed message because I only use xxx for that one thing" is valid for every app as long as you have fragmentation in the messaging space I think. That's why I like the idea of using the same client for a multitude of services through bridges, and not forcing people to necessarily use your network (even if they should :p)
  - edraferi 7y ago
    How do you deliver end-to-end encryption in a federated architecture like that?
    - dnpp123 7y ago
      You can peek at : https://matrix.org/docs/develop/ https://matrix.org/docs/develop/ tldr; similar to signal afaik The docs there for E2E are fairly old but get you an idea how it works. E2E has improved a lot in the last few months IMHO.

noncoml 7y ago

We brought it to ourselves by not being willing to pay for WhatsApp. WhatsApp before getting bought by FB was begging for money and is my understanding that it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Public had a choice of free(as in beer) products vs privacy. We chose the former.

chipperyman573 7y ago
Whatsapp used to cost $1/year which covered operating costs (first year free).
- Jommi 7y ago
  Not true, WhatsApp did have a pricing test where certain users were pushed to pay 1€/$ per year. It was never unilaterally enforced.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Is that what that was? I remember getting the app and wondering why no one I knew ever had to pay for it.

danfang 7y ago

Some alternatives to FB and WhatsApp exist - I’ve been working on an alternative social network called Thread (https://get.thread-app.com https://get.thread-app.com). Check it out! I’d also recommend services like Signal for secure, private messaging.