[jamesmiller5]

All I need is a better chat app, that Facebook won't buy. I can now text, voice record, send photos/selfies and video messages easily to my social circles. Connecting to second degree connections is fast and everyone I know has an account.

I want to leave Facebook but I can't give up such an amazing chat experience that keeps me connected to my family and close friends. Even if I got my immediate family to use a different app, I'd have to keep Facebook for old friends :( .

(edit, spelling)

[JumpCrisscross]

> that Facebook won't buy

Facebook will buy because it’s profitable to buy. Monopoly power is a known mode of market failure. (Note: you don’t need 100% of a market for the deleterious effects of monopoly power to manifest.)

The only solution is blocking future acquisitions and breaking up Facebook.

[simias]

Facebook won't buy IRC or any distributed open source decentralized protocol. Chats, newsgroups, email... The net used to be a lot more open and decentralized that it is now, maybe it's time to go back a couple of decades?

[aerique]

Won't they do with decentralized chat what they did with XMPP?: integrate support for a while to keep users from getting away and then drop that support again when the time is right?

[needcaffeine]

Like...Slack.

[dx034]

Only using whatsapp without other facebook accounts should still be fine. Whatsapp has end2end encryption (unlike FB messenger) and if you don't use other FB products they can't use your data for ads. Obviously not as good as an independent messenger but will cause the same revenue loss for FB.

[majewsky]

> if you don't use other FB products they can't use your data for ads

They're still siphoning their data. Just refuse WhatsApp access to your phone's address book, and see how it outright punishes you for doing that. Most of my WhatsApp contacts maintain their own names in their profiles, yet WhatsApp stubbornly shows their phone number as contact name. I usually identify contacts by looking at the profile picture (or by the conversation history if they changed that recently). Then again, I only have 3-4 contacts on WhatsApp. I would be less willing to put up with this if there were dozens of active contacts in there.

[oarsinsync]

I believe that’s only text. Try sending someone a video. Takes a while. Try forwarding that video to someone else moments later. Happens pretty quickly.

Same applies with photos in my experience. I’d assume voice notes,location pins, etc are also subject to this as well.

[fwn]

WhatsApp reduces the quality of your media and saves it in a second folder of your gallery.

If you forward already converted media it will be taken from the gallery in it's compressed, substantially smaller version.

[oarsinsync]

On iPhones it has a splash screen for compression and then a separate spinner in the chat for the upload progress for videos. That second upload spinner doesn’t occur for immediately forwarded videos.

[fwn]

That is interesting and different from what I have experienced on Android. I've no explanation for that.

[dx034]

It's all encrypted. Encryption in group chats is a bit weaker to provide better usability (there was an article recently I believe) but messages itself are encrypted. And since we're talking here about usage of data for ad tracking, any encryption is likely good enough.

They can of course still track meta data, e.g. tailor your ads based on interest of contacts. But if you only use whatsapp (ad free), they own't make any money with it.

[VikingCoder]

I'm pretty sure what we all need is a better chat protocol, and multiple apps that implement it.

[rootlocus]

How about: https://telegram.org/

[908087]

How about we stop suggesting a messaging app that styles itself as privacy-oriented and encrypted despite not being end to end encrypted by default, and using questionable encryption even for the optional E2E functionality that nobody uses?

[rootlocus]

E2E encryption enabled by default wasn't in the OP request. But instead of being snarky, how about you suggest a better alternative?

[908087]

Signal.

[wellboy]

No telegram with several hundred million users?