There are other ways to express this than “your suggestion sucks, let’s do it my way instead”.
And even not caring about privacy, Signal is an instant messaging application, Instagram is a social media around photos. What is the better chouce to text your roommates, I wonder.
I was told to download it for my orientation and as much as I hated it I actually tried everything to sign up and it just would not work. It would never send a text to my phone number. Dogshit application and service I really don’t understand why it is popular in universities
Out of curiosity, is your phone number real or virtual ( like Google Voice) Many services won’t send to virtual numbers anymore because they’re used for scams so much.
Bleh, had an argument with someone about switching to signal or something other than FB messenger and he flat out refused on the basis that it would require him to have another app on his phone.
Three months later, he had signal installed on his phone. No idea what happened there, probably someone with more social clout than I had got him to install it. No mention of the prior argument.
Instagram, FB Mesenger, SMS…? IDK why you guys don’t just use WhatsApp. It’s the standard messaging app everywhere in the world (except the US, of course)
EDIT: Wow, lots of people in denial ITT. Look, it’s simple: you can hate Meta/Facebook as much as you want (and I do), but you can’t deny that WhatsApp is a great product, feature-wise. People who compare it to SMS, Instagram chat, FB messenger or anything else are honestly laughable. The only service that can hold a candle against it is perhaps Telegram
Owned by meta but better than fb and insta messages because of e2ee.
Still wish i could delete it (have it inside a shelter work profile).
Matrix bridging is an option for whatsapp as well as sms, discord, and others, although it does make using these services more private (beyond not having the app installed).
Because this website is an echo chamber that hates big corporations and think the holy grail is to avoid having an online footprint by not using big apps, thus achieving “privacy”.
Sure, but most of the people on here have no clue what they’re talking about and think using a VPN gives you pRiVaCy, or that not using Facebook somehow is sticking it to the man
Hurting people for profit? Who are they hurting? It’s a free market, and it’s your choice to use their products or not. Just stop fucking whining about it all the time.
You’re a corporate slave only if you choose to be. This isn’t some 1984 dystopia as you try to make it out to be.
Start worrying about real issues. You’re a free person and I believe in you :)
You seem to care a lot about not caring. You keep posting. That apathy is looking as hollow as your ideology.
Hurting people for profit?
Yes. If you weren’t ignorant, you’d understand that “it’s just business, businesses exist to turn a profit” and implying that’s a good thing and the best possible system means lots of extra pollution, safety corners cut, and sometimes even bloody coups for the sake of additional profits in far corners of the world or outright slavery in impoverished nations. Again, all for profit. That hurts people. You’re that dense.
Just stop fucking whining about it all the time.
Stop whining about people calling out an obvious reality that you don’t like.
You’re a corporate slave only if you choose to be.
People around the world don’t have that choice, especially when toxic waste is dumped where they live or when their governments are destabilized and replaced with puppets representing corporate interests to further loot their lands.
This isn’t some 1984 dystopia as you try to make it out to be.
Of course that’s your only frame of reference. Because you’re ignorant.
You’re a free person and I believe in you :)
Your concern trolling attempt, smiley and all, makes you sound like the juvenile contrarian that you are.
Now you’re talking about the real issues I mentioned. I’m glad to have awakened your sense of justice, and hope you stop crying about optional internet cookies.
You instantly resort to name-calling and personal insults while calling me juvenile, like a true keyboard warrior, so I think we’re done here.
No one else here is licking boots like you are in this thread and you’ve been doing it for hours. You care that much about other people caring about corporate greed fucking them over, as well as fucking society and the planet we live on.
You instantly resort to name-calling and personal insults
Because this website is an echo chamber
Yeah disagreeing with a tiny army of lemmings
You’re an exceptionally hypocritical crybully that gets off to feeling so very smart by being contrarian in a thread full of people that dare to acknowledge reality, unlike you.
and hope you stop crying
You can log out any time you like and return to a circlejerk website of your choosing where you can all pretend you’re free thinkers for agreeing with each other there.
That’s not the implication at all and the fact that you even think that just shows how fucking dumb you are. The weeb shit is just the cherry on top lmao
Why does a corporation’s opinion of you mean anything? Why do you care if they care? You choose to use their products. Nothing is free, and if you don’t like them earning money by showing you ads, don’t use their products.
Why does a corporation’s opinion of you mean anything?
Because they don’t need your simpering sycophantic posting here. They got legal teams and lots of political protections.
Why do you care if they care?
Because they’re making society and the world worse entirely for profit and they’re also conditioning ignorant people like you to stan for them.
You choose to use their products.
In general, not as much as you think and when I have no choice to do so, that isn’t a choice, is it?
Nothing is free, and if you don’t like them earning money by showing you ads, don’t use their products.
You are a laughably pathetic bootlicker if you’re sinking to those thoughtless platitudes.
Pollution happens whether or not an individual buys into the product. Erosions of personal legal protections happen when the lobbyists encroach a little more. “Vote with your wallet” does absolutely nothing at a societal level but I think you’re too willfully sycophantic to understand that.
That wasn’t the bootlicker’s argument. The full context of what he was arguing was “businesses doing whatever they want to make money is good actually and voting with your wallet is all you’re allowed to do no matter how systemic and societal consequences harm you.” galaxy-brain
I only have WhatsApp because I have so many non-American friends ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I dragged my mom and sister over to using it, and everyone has been warned that the second I see Meta trying to monetize it, I'm going to whine until they all move to Signal (which has pretty much identical functionality.)
If the creator of WhatsApp was willing to walk away from billions of dollars because he didn’t agree under principle with where it was going under Meta, I’m willing to not use the app.
Not that I use it or am fond of it, but wouldn’t Telegram be more of a middle ground in this context?
It’s not big corporate (Meta), nor smaller nonprofit or decentralized/self-hosted (Signal/Matrix~Element), and is a business offering a messaging app with encryption options one may enable as desired.
How is it not better? Are you actually arguing that plaintext and e2e encrypted messages are somewhat equivalent? It IS better, period. Not ideal because it’s still owned by Meta, but definitely better
Huh, dude, I am forced to use WhatsApp because it is the number 1 app here where I live, nobody even used SMS, which I actually didn’t believe was a thing until another lemming pointed it out lol.
WhatsApp has always been behind other options such as Telegram, for example their WhatsApp web implementation is a huge joke compared to Telegram, or the way it stores the data too.
The way Whatsapp stores data is arguably more secure than Telegram, i.e. not in the cloud but only locally. It sucks if you lose access to your phone and you have not set up backups via iCloud/Google Drive, but it’s definitely better in terms of privacy and security.
I don’t know anyone who uses whatsapp in my friend group lol… Tbf noone uses anything privacy related either so I know I’d never use whatsapp, looks like it’s straight from 2012
as a gen zer myself I would follow it up with WHY? give me a reason WHY. I don’t really see a difference between instagram groups and signal groups. I think what it is for most people is some lame app they will download for only that specific purpose. The only reason why iMessage is popular is it’s the default. If the EU passed a regulation to force Apple to have a default messager that only supported SMS, and iMessage to be a separate appstore app, or even just an extension for the messages app. it would die within a year. Meta groups are only popular cause they are tired to 2 of the biggest social platform being facebook and instagram.
Signal is just a messaging app, and worst of all to a ton of people you have to share your phone number, something that is kinda intimate and you might only share it among the closer people in your friend group, even when signal launches usernames unless it builds something around signal it’s just another annoying messaging app to keep track of.
There’s an app called Session that is similar to Signal without the phone number requirement but then you have the issue of moving people to an even more niche platform
For some reason the session network (oxen network) now blocks my Hetzner VPS connection (I use for VPN). Have been a session user for around 2 years now and now I have to reconsider Signal.
There’s also threema which is pretty tried and tested and quite popular where I live (and also not connected to weird crypto schemes) but it of course has the same issue.
I love SimpleX because you can have multiple users and you can use 1-time invite codes so you don’t actually have to give anyone an identifier of any kind if you don’t want to.
I’ve tried to use session to talk to a couple family members but I just don’t get notifications, so I just use signal. (no I’m not on slow mode, I just use microG)
Security and avoidance of anti-features != anonymity. If you wanted that you would have to use something like GNU Jami which has account archives and is peer to peer.
I’m just grateful that the phone number requirement means less of a hassle for others.
You pretty much hit the nail. I doubt he has ever even used Signal in his life. And even if it was some lame all for a specific purpose, it is a better experience than SMS since Apple loves to gatekeep iMessage and Android users can’t use it.
I tried this before, but with asking someone why they liked the iPhone so much.
I kept asking why and they’d keep giving me non-answer types of answers. Basically, they had no reason. But that still didn’t stop them from liking their products.
I don’t know, dude. Even asking ‘why’ doesn’t work anymore.
I didn’t mean to imply it was an ability issue, they are just unwilling to change lol, they don’t care about privacy. Classic “Well I don’t have anything to hide” fallacy.
I just get so annoyed whenever someone broadly says “god I hate the youth for being so dumb”, idiots come in all ages y’all
It is not it is the direct messaging system built within Instagram itself. It is extremely popular among Gen Z because they get to spam each other with thousands of Instagram reels and shitty memes
Nice to see a fellow zoomer that does not have any social media. I was the biggest social media addict for years and refuse to ever go back. Fuck those algorithm driven psychologically manipulative social media services that also spy on everything you do.
I was, a long time ago. Back when you actually used it to follow your friends and see what they were up to. Meta fixed that right up for me when they enshittified it with rampant ads, “Reels” and “suggestions”, not to mention cloning literally every other social media feature, to the point that I can’t even find my actual friends anymore.
I’m fairly certain they combined Instagram DMs and FB Messenger into one thing a couple of years ago. Instagram DM is now just FB Messenger but in the Instagram app, and its chats can be viewed and interacted with fully from Messenger.
I have several people that I have blocked because they continuously send me Reels, despite me never replying to a single message and asking them to stop sending them.
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