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>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 U
by 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 agoMan, 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 agoA 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 agoThat technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.
- catoc 9mo agoServing 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least
- speleding 9mo agoNot 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 agoEmail has solved that problem already.
- showsover 9mo agoClaiming email has solved spam is a WILD take as 45% of current email traffic is spam.
- ForHackernews 9mo agoHow much of that shows up in your inbox? I don't care about packets that are dropped by my firewall.
- lmz 9mo agoI 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 agoYes, it can. And it has done so before.
- ExoticPearTree 9mo agoCare to provide a link where the EU can tell a US company how to do business in Brazil (random country)?
- neko-kai 9mo agoHere'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 agoShouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
- joe_mamba 9mo agoYou 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 agoThere is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.
- xmcp123 9mo agoEverybody says this until there’s an alternative. There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
- zarzavat 9mo agoThe 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 agoYou 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 agoBesides 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 agoIt'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.