[toastal]

Moving to WhatsApp is hardly an upgrade. Having to trust the encryption out of Meta and be required to share your address book/contacts and metadata with them is not the future we should want for the next generation. It's not a "rest of the world thing either"; I'm out here in SEA and the only folks to ask me for a WhatsApp (don't have) were Europeans.

[happymellon]

Moving to WhatsApp takes out the Apple restriction, which is a step up as I can use WhatsApp on Windows and Linux too.

The drawback is the phone number requirement, but this is true of all the other chat apps. If there was one that was functionality equivalent but accounts didn't require a number then I would switch.

[toastal]

I can agree any Apple-specific lock-in is not good, however you're talking about the ability to chat on the platform and not going beyond just access to include whether we should be trusting our data to that platform—different questions. Both XMPP or Matrix have clients on all OSs, lack a phone number requirement, but can also both be self-hosted + decentralized, and with open specs and you can read the source on the encryption to validate the trustworthiness. These are the routes we should head and there's nothing stopping folks from using them today other than they don't have a for-profit entity to market them.

Obviously, this goes back to the root issue as there are philosophical reasons to straight prefer certain technologies—like the ability to side-load apps on your pocket computer—that you should try not to compromise on just because of peer pressure.

[happymellon]

I agree, I dislike sharing any data with Facebook/WhatsApp but I shouldn't require children to spend $1000 to be allowed to communicate.

XMPP would be preferred, but isn't quite as simple as iMessage/WhatsApp at the moment, and Matrix isn't the same. I do see that some of the XMPP clients are getting pretty slick and I could probably move the family to something like that soon enough.

[jssfr]

You may or may not like https://snikket.org.

It's a bunch of XMPP software (Conversations, Siskin, Prosody), with minor patches, under a common branding (the Snikket parrot), plus a web portal.

It's aimed at the friends&family use case, with an easy invitation-based onboarding workflow. You can either self-host a Snikket Server (= Prosody + TURN + certificate automation) or sign up for the hosted beta (which is either bring-your-own-domain or a domain under snikket.chat).

Note that snikket.org is not, by itself, an XMPP service where you can just sign up. You either need to run your own instance, or you need to sign up for hosting.

[happymellon]

I will give it a go, cheers

[toastal]

I self-hosted ejabberd on an 2014 smartphone using postmarketOS last weekend. The defaults were almost all good enough and the only tricky part was setting up all the networking bits (getting my domain names hooked up to nameservers, dynamic DNS, Nginx proxy on the router to get ACME certs from the built-in ejabberd module) because these aren't thing I work with on the regular. Performance for users countable on one hand hasn't been an issue. Self-hosting Synapse for Matrix on an at-home device... good luck.

[IshKebab]

It's definitely a "vast majority of the world" thing (except China I guess). Check this list:

https://eagernomad.com/most-popular-messaging-apps-by-countr...

> hardly an upgrade.

It's a huge upgrade. It's not perfect but it beats being forced to buy iPhones by a mile. Facebook already has the address book of most people anyway. The extra metadata they get from WhatsApp is marginal at best.

[toastal]

"Vast" has subjectivity to it, and neither of us will bother doing this per capita, but China, as well as the US, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines have massive populations and it's not the most popular in them.

I suppose if the low-hanging goal is better than iMessage lock-in then sure. Saying Facebook has a lot of data already doesn't make it excusable--especially with younger generations not even having or wanting accounts (though Instagram, same parent, yadda). I actually don't think this is marginal either as it's not difficult to use Facebook from a browser or just not share your contacts, but a requirement is a different story, if this data wasn't valuable, why would they have payed billions to acquire a chat app with E2E enabled?

[IshKebab]

> I suppose if the low-hanging goal is better than iMessage lock-in then sure.

Sadly that is the low-hanging goal. There's pretty much zero chance we will ever get a perfect e2e encrypted, federated, decentralised, open, spam free, popular IM system, but I would say WhatsApp is furthest towards that overall. If you exclude "popular" then Signal is probably the best but in IM systems "popular" is probably the most important characteristic.

Not having to buy a really expensive phone to use it is another important characteristic. If WhatsApp ever gets a foothold in America I guarantee Apple will open iMessage up to Android.

[toastal]

The irony is that I have some regrets pushing to move my family to Signal (mostly away from Facebook Messenger and SMS) while I've pondered a dumbphone or a Linux phone due to SIM card+Android/iOS primary device required. On this note though, it seems WhatsApp has pulled out on the upgrade to KaiOS 3.x which hurts accessibility to some folks.

We're not in an ideal spot and self-hosting is more complicated than it should be. That said, there still are options to join public Matrix and XMPP servers that cover the all the above features and would be accessible even on smaller mobile platforms like KaiOS, Capyloon, and all Linuxes.

But also… what if Apple converted iMessage to use one of those open protocols (like the reverse of how Google and Facebook's chats were XMPP until they decided there's more to gain making it proprietary after scaling with FOSS)? Sure [e-mail] would still give them a 'vanity' URL like the color of a message bubble, but at least everyone could participate and have all the same features on a technical level.