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by IshKebab 1208 days ago
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.
1 comments
toastal 1207 days ago
"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?

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IshKebab 1207 days ago
> 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.

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toastal 1207 days ago
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 tim@imessage.apple.corp 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.

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