As Seirdy notes:
It just keeps getting more relevant. WhatsApp, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit…each disaster worse than the last. The companies in charge know that the users will just take it after having their autonomy taken first.
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seems like a lot of revisionist bullshit in this rant, eg:
WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters
WhatsApp rose because:
a) If was free
b) it used data vs sms/mms which was becoming cheaper
c) it was cross platform at the time (blackberry, android, nokia, etc)
d) It used your existing phone number as your identifier, so onboarding and finding existing contacts was swift
Exactly. People started using and are still using Whatsapp because it allows global, free communication. When it started getting popular, greedy service providers were still charging several euro cents for a few bytes of data sent via SMS, even to the same network, of course people went for the free alternative (I actually installed Viber before WhatsApp).
Nowadays it still has the advantage of being free when communicating abroad. I travel a lot, and calls from foreign countries, sometimes on different continents, are expensive and low in quality; a local data SIM on my dual sim phone allows me to call friends and relatives at home with the same ease as a normal phone call and without crazy costs.
It used your existing phone number as your identifier
Wait, people think of that as an advantage? For me, that has always been the reason I have refused to use it. It’s also why I never even tried Google’s Allo despite being a big fan. A chat application that isn’t using the phone network shouldn’t be tied to your phone number. It makes cross-platform support extremely awkward, and that’s noticeable in how poor What’s App still is for cross-platform use.
For people who previously used SMS and had their contacts saved in the phone’s pre-installed contact app, WhatsApp could use all those contacts out of the box.
This is where I’m at with Discord :/
Can confirm. I still have WhatsApp installed because otherwise, I can’t talk to certain friends.
I was forced to stop using WhatsApp a while back because they simply stopped supporting my phone, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to buy a new one just to use WhatsApp. I came to the conclusion that anyone that doesn’t bother reaching out e.g. via SMS isn’t a real friend anyway, and indeed it hasn’t affected me personally much. There are some people I’ve lost contact with completely now, but we didn’t have proper conversations when I still had WhatsApp anyway, so not much was lost.
The article makes some good points, cooperation can easily get greedy when their platform gets too large. It does feel like it tries to connect FOSS to privacy, though, and that’s a bit more controversial, especially when it comes to the Fediverse. For a platform like Lemmy the most important thing is to share the post that you published, there is limited development time, security is hard, and when things go wrong it is hard to point at someone.
For example, sending private messages often leads to these private messages being readable by the admins of the instance. In the same way, instance admins can also see the email address that you provided. So we just have to trust the instance admin to be capable enough to protect our data and not leak it out on the internet.
Of course, these issues also exist in companies that want to push out new features to attract users instead of spending time to test if everything is secure. It simply is a difficult point for both FOSS and commercial software, and we need to hold both FOSS and commercial parties responsible for respecting our privacy. At least with FOSS, we can switch to a fork if a maintainer does not do their job well.
Yet I disagree with the article in many points. It didn’t always belong to Facebook, and that’s how it started, originally it even asked for something akin to one dollar for one year of usage (it was converted to some very small amount for each country).
One should also understand that in countries like India, Brazil, and a few others SMS and Internet on phones are extremely expensive. WhatsApp provided a very nice way to bypass SMS and stay within the lower plans for internet usage on mobiles. The big advantage here was to use your work or home internet to still reach out to people.
I know that in Brazil telcos introduced an entry line phone plan at one time saying that Whatsapp messages would be exempted from data caps.
Eventually, Facebook bought WhatsApp.
Saying it is simple to replace WhatsApp without considering the economic situation of the people relying on it is absurd.
Comparing it to FOSS alternatives at the current stage is easy enough, but every attempt at creating a FOSS alternative didn’t take. It is not uncommon to see the FOSS software not prioritizing the functionality and needs of users, and that will have people flock to whatever is useful to them, despite possible hidden costs.
I say this as someone who uses Matrix for chat, yet there are some critical bugs in usability that developers just ignore (like doing something basic like sharing from IOS breaks the spec and causes errors to several others).
When things like these happen there is always someone who will come ahead and say “this is provided for free” or “learn to code and fix it yourself”.
Eventually we get Pikachu faces or articles talking about the greatness of FOSS while ignoring all the main point “people still need a stable tool that fits their economic power while someone argues about how to fix a problem they don’t really care about”. As someone who mostly uses open source software, this is really frustrating.
