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diffusive@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The chat space is problematic.

There are a lot of apps that don’t encrypt at all (e.g. Google chat, discord, etc)
There are apps that encrypt but they are subject to jurisdictions that can or may in the future force backdoors (e.g., Chinese apps, possibly telegram, possibly US apps in the future)
There are apps that encrypt, are in countries that are privacy focused but are not for free (e.g., threema)

This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have

Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors

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renzev@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used

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- PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ain’t that the truth
  
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- Redex68@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I mean honestly, feature wise, it’s pretty good in my opinion. It has some very useful features Signal lacks (e.g. live location sharing) and it’s not slow or badly designed in my opinion.
  
  I still prefer Signal since I don’t like Facebook, but realistically speaking WhatsApp is pretty good.
  
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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

WhatsApp

Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it’s so prevalent elsewhere.

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- HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  IIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
    
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    echodot@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It is elsewhere now it’s just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
    
    It’s way text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you’ll “be at the train station in 15 minutes” that’s quite a lot of characters, so that became “@ stn n 15” which is almost incomprehensible these days.
    
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  - EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.
    
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