9 ms·

> any WhatsApp user in the region The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my famil

> any WhatsApp user in the region The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.

joe_mamba 9mo 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.
- neves 9mo ago
  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
  - fooker 9mo ago
    > It's not a technical problem How do you do encryption?
    - zrm 9mo ago
      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.
      - lazide 9mo ago
        That technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.
    - catoc 9mo ago
      Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least
  - speleding 9mo ago
    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).
    - ForHackernews 9mo ago
      Email has solved that problem already.
      - showsover 9mo ago
        Claiming email has solved spam is a WILD take as 45% of current email traffic is spam.
        ForHackernews 9mo ago
        How much of that shows up in your inbox? I don't care about packets that are dropped by my firewall.
        lmz 9mo ago
        I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.
  - ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
    > Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work. I don't know if you know this, but the EU cannot force a company to obey EU laws outside of the EU.
    - neko-kai 9mo ago
      Yes, it can. And it has done so before.
      - ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
        Care to provide a link where the EU can tell a US company how to do business in Brazil (random country)?
        neko-kai 9mo ago
        Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-suffers-stunning-eu-anti-trust-defeat/articleshow/2378538.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well. 'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU. Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU. Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.
- Grimblewald 9mo ago
  Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
  - joe_mamba 9mo ago
    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.
  - Scarblac 9mo ago
    There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.
  - xmcp123 9mo ago
    Everybody says this until there’s an alternative. There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
    - zarzavat 9mo ago
      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.
      - tonyhart7 9mo ago
        You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"
        expedition32 9mo ago
        Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated. Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.
- kelvinjps10 9mo ago
  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
- ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
  > 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.
hei-lima 9mo ago
In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
- thevillagechief 9mo ago
  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.
  - abustamam 9mo ago
    I belong to two Toastmasters groups. One is majority non-immigrant American/caucasian, one is majority immigrant (from India, Pakistan, etc). The first one does club communication primarily via email. The second does club communication exclusively thru WhatsApp. It's an interesting divide. I do have some Caucasian friends who use WhatsApp. One stopped using it when FB purchased it, which I can respect. Most people I know in the states though just use iMessage or signal.
  - hei-lima 9mo ago
    It's surprising but makes a lot of sense
- nozzlegear 9mo ago
  SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.
  - xvedejas 9mo ago
bambax 9mo ago
> pretty much useless To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  > 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?
- prmoustache 9mo ago
  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.
krzyk 9mo ago
It is an unique feature. Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.
- miki123211 9mo ago
  "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.
  - krzyk 9mo ago
    This is for EAA, which includes Switzerland, Norway and even Turkey. Yes, it does not include UK, but that's on them. I encourage people living in other countries to complain to their goverment on Metas policies.
  - Tom1380 9mo ago
    I'm in Switzerland and I can confirm that it applies here too
zjaffee 9mo ago
I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.
yapyap 9mo ago
> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent. … useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
krick 9mo ago
I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it. So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.

joe_mamba 9mo 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.

neves 9mo ago
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
- fooker 9mo ago
  > It's not a technical problem How do you do encryption?
  - zrm 9mo ago
    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.
    - lazide 9mo ago
      That technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.
  - catoc 9mo ago
    Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least
- speleding 9mo ago
  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).
  - ForHackernews 9mo ago
    Email has solved that problem already.
    - showsover 9mo ago
      Claiming email has solved spam is a WILD take as 45% of current email traffic is spam.
      - ForHackernews 9mo ago
        How much of that shows up in your inbox? I don't care about packets that are dropped by my firewall.
        lmz 9mo ago
        I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.
- ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
  > Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work. I don't know if you know this, but the EU cannot force a company to obey EU laws outside of the EU.
  - neko-kai 9mo ago
    Yes, it can. And it has done so before.
    - ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
      Care to provide a link where the EU can tell a US company how to do business in Brazil (random country)?
      - neko-kai 9mo ago
        Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-suffers-stunning-eu-anti-trust-defeat/articleshow/2378538.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well. 'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU. Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU. Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.
Grimblewald 9mo ago
Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago
  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.
- Scarblac 9mo ago
  There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.
- xmcp123 9mo ago
  Everybody says this until there’s an alternative. There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
  - zarzavat 9mo ago
    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.
    - tonyhart7 9mo ago
      You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"
      - expedition32 9mo ago
        Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated. Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.
kelvinjps10 9mo ago
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
ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
> 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.

hei-lima 9mo ago

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.

thevillagechief 9mo ago
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.
- abustamam 9mo ago
  I belong to two Toastmasters groups. One is majority non-immigrant American/caucasian, one is majority immigrant (from India, Pakistan, etc). The first one does club communication primarily via email. The second does club communication exclusively thru WhatsApp. It's an interesting divide. I do have some Caucasian friends who use WhatsApp. One stopped using it when FB purchased it, which I can respect. Most people I know in the states though just use iMessage or signal.
- hei-lima 9mo ago
  It's surprising but makes a lot of sense
nozzlegear 9mo ago
SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.
- xvedejas 9mo ago

bambax 9mo ago

> pretty much useless To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.

swiftcoder 9mo ago
> 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?
prmoustache 9mo ago
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.

krzyk 9mo ago

It is an unique feature. Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.

miki123211 9mo ago
"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.
- krzyk 9mo ago
  This is for EAA, which includes Switzerland, Norway and even Turkey. Yes, it does not include UK, but that's on them. I encourage people living in other countries to complain to their goverment on Metas policies.
- Tom1380 9mo ago
  I'm in Switzerland and I can confirm that it applies here too

zjaffee 9mo ago

I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.

yapyap 9mo ago

> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent. … useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.

krick 9mo ago

I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it. So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.