[alexland]

Most of these sound like reasons not to use Facebook in general.

While the seen indicator is a legitimate annoyance, it's been commonplace for some years now. I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have it.

As for the rest of your points, Facebook's money comes from ads. These concerns are not limited to chat, but using Facebook in general. As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

Every part of the service is designed to help them do this, saying that these are reasons to "not use Messenger" is missing the point. The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook. You just get to message friends, plain and simple. The benefit is you're not being enticed into scrolling your news feed, spammed with notifications about upcoming events etc.

Plus, there are rumours they're going to bring e2e encryption in a la Whatsapp, which would pretty much squash points 2 and 3.

[greggman]

It seems unlikely they'd bring the encryption in. I often have several messengers open. My phone, my tablet, my home desktop, my home laptop, my other home laptop, my work desktop, my work laptop. How will encrypting like Whatsapp keep that working? Some how they'll always be tunneling to my phone from all the various machines?

Also, as an alternative, Hangouts stores my chat history in gmail (opt in), so unlike Messenger/Line/Whatsapp I have a history of all my chats on Hangouts which I actually find very useful.

That said, 99% of my friends and family are on FB Messenger

[gcr]

I'm waiting for the next chat service to emulate the 'ytalk' and 'talkd' practice of the 1980s to echo all keystrokes to the other party as they're typed, rather than waiting for the user to press send.

"Instant Messaging" indeed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

[christop]

There's a nice XMPP extension for that.

Spec: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html Demos: http://www.realjabber.org/

Not that Google (or whoever) are going to implement it now...

[andrewmutz]

> As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

This is why Facebook is best used in an incognito-mode browser window.

[newscracker]

[This is about desktop browser use]

I use multiple tabs with FB whenever I do have to use it, and private/incognito mode wouldn't work well for that scenario because it would force me to login in every tab. So instead I use normal mode with extensions to block ads, tracking cookies, social features on websites and Facebook Redirection (where clicks are handled by FB to track which site is being visited). This is with a combination of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and a few others. That way, I get to have multiple FB tabs but don't see my profile in the comments section on another site to allow further tracking. Any link I visit from FB isn't exposed to FB either.

[pikachu_is_cool]

> I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have [the seen indicator].

I don't use those either. I stick to texting and iMessage.

> The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook.

You're tied to their ad platform. Whether you view those ads or not are up to you; but you are nonetheless tied to it. They analyze your private conversations with the eventual hope to manipulate you.

[travis_bickle]

Problems of Messenger App (and not Facebook company): 1. Can't log out 2. Can't turn off the 'online' indicator 3. 'Seen' indicator

[CrazedGeek]

You can turn the seen indicators off in iMessage, fwiw.