Comment on Deshittification
Auster@thebrainbin.org 5 days agoI made the community pretty open-ended, so I guess both count.
Also, on using alternatives being a type of deshittification, I'd say even that with competition around, the original or more prevalent tool needs to seek ways to be better as to not lose market share.
JGrffn@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I think concentration of market share itself is an issue. I just got banned from WhatsApp, twice in a row, by the automated spam banhammer they have, and I fully expect to get banned a third time as soon as their registration retry timeout expires in like 18 fucking hours (I’ve been at this since Friday).
I hate Meta as much as anyone else around here, but I’ve essentially been cut off from my entire community with this single event (which, to clarify, is a completely unwarranted ban that has been reverted by WhatsApp twice now). Everyone uses WhatsApp for their hustles, businesses, friend groups, neighborhood groups, etc. I have tried for YEARS to get a movement going to at least consider installing alternatives. I’m now left with signal which has 1 contact, and telegram which a ton of people downloaded during a whatsapp outage during the pandemic, but which nobody uses anymore because… WhatsApp came back rather quickly.
The lack of interop and lack of any usage of email on WhatsApp for anything other than support tickets, means I might need to ditch my phone number, which I’ve had for 20 years, because Meta’s AI got trigger happy with me for some obscure reason that not even they seem to understand.
Something that truly pisses me off about this specific conversation is, people in the privacy circles can’t quite seem to grasp just how much of a stranglehold Meta has on its communities. There’s 0 chance of me being able to get even a fraction of the people I interact with to use something other than WhatsApp. I’ve tried multiple times through the years and I have never been able to do anything about it, and it quite frankly pisses me off that the general response to someone using WhatsApp around here is “just stop using it and get your friends to stop too lol wtf why you such a lil bitch” as if we don’t live in a society that depends on these fucking monopolies because that’s how they were designed. You quite literally can’t opt for alternatives or go against the flow on this because it can result in you being cut off from your entire community, and as much as anyone here likes to LARP that they’re post-apocalyptic survivors who can and do live by themselves or whatever, that’s not the world we live in.
Some stuff needs to become interoperable, their concentrated market share usage needs to directly correlate to how much regulatory oversight they receive, and ideally it should either be diversified or government-owned if the concentration is too high and can’t be reversed. All of this can only happen through legislation, and clearly legislation isn’t doing shit because the EU’s DMA should have me connecting into the WhatsApp network from other apps already.