Technology

In business there isn't a monopoly just yet teams and slack are way more common

Nope. Ease to use will always triumph over open source

I want to add "federated" to your list, as the only thing that actually matters long term. Signal checks your requirements but has already started to turn user-hostile (e.g. it mandates its own client so you get to have crypto payments whether you like it or not), and, as the single point of control, is an easy target and a single major liability.

Remember the days when WhatsApp was nice to its users? There is no technical guarantee that other centralized systems won't go the same path, which is largely mitigated when the network is made of smaller interoperable actors (i.e. a federation).

I would love to see XMPP be rediscovered and massively adopted as that next gen messenger. I don't trust Matrix to ever be reliable or get past their neverending funding troubles.

Why do people still have faith in this broken system? Companies the size and reach of Meta, do not "fail". Big companies like these have enough control and power to quash or simply buyout future competitors that would usurp them.

There is no system where people vote with their wallets and we can shift control by way of consumer revenue alone. That dream died some 100+ years ago when companies grew large enough to overthrow governments (Chiquita Banana), shape societies (Walmart & McDonald's) and build monopolies so resilient, they will control us into the next millennium (Google).

If you're all banking on the freedom of economy and capitalism self correcting, man is that a long wait for a train that won't come.

There are many people on the privacy communities that will preach about Telegram. Those are supposedly "privacy conscious" folk. Bro, most people just need a slick looking interface that makes them feel cool. Hating on Meta is also somewhat cool at the moment, and those two reasons are why most people switch.

There is no hope.

why do people use it?

because it gained popularity in countries where sending SMS used to cost money at the time, years before Facebook has purchased it, became the main means of communication, and it turns out that moving an entire country's (or even continent's) population away from a messaging app has proven to be difficult.

People are stupid and don't care. I doubt many people here on lemmy are using them but there is always gonna be some using those mentioned, Instagram, or any of facebooks 'services'.

I despise anything Facebook, Meta. Zuck. But with shitty internet, WhatsApp is the only thing that works. If they put ads, I am gone from it.

That's why I'll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.

Sure, it's an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it's also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn't controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).

I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won't be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.

They won't. Most people just don't care at all unfortunately :(

They put ads in I'm switching. People can send me SMS for all I care

Signal has a feature that tells you when done of your contacts starts using it. So I know for a fact how many of my friends have the app and let me tell you, it's a lot more than I thought. At least 50-60%, which means it wouldn't be that hard to tip the balance if Whatsapp pulls something truly stupid.

I can't speak for everybody obviously but from what I've noticed people around here aren't overly attached to any particular messaging app. One app, two apps, three apps, it doesn't really matter, you use what you need. There's nothing stopping you from keeping Whatsapp around for the chat history but doing your future chatting on Signal, or mixing the two. It doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be a hard switch all at once.

Good bot

Can I ask why he wouldn’t use Signal?

Delete your WhatsApp, block your SMS and if he wants to talk with you, he will use Signal.