[joe_mamba]

>The regional limit makes it pretty much useless.

Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.

[neves]

Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.

It's not a technical problem. It's a political one

[speleding]

Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.

The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).

[ForHackernews]

Email has solved that problem already.

[showsover]

Claiming email has solved spam is a WILD take as 45% of current email traffic is spam.

[ForHackernews]

How much of that shows up in your inbox? I don't care about packets that are dropped by my firewall.

[lmz]

I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.

[ExoticPearTree]

> Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.

I don't know if you know this, but the EU cannot force a company to obey EU laws outside of the EU.

[neko-kai]

Yes, it can. And it has done so before.

[ExoticPearTree]

Care to provide a link where the EU can tell a US company how to do business in Brazil (random country)?

[neko-kai]

Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well.

'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU.

Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU. Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.

[fooker]

> It's not a technical problem

How do you do encryption?

[zrm]

A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to [e-mail] then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.

[lazide]

That technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.

[catoc]

Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least

[Grimblewald]

Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.

[direwolf20]

There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.

[j1elo]

To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.

I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.

[mhitza]

BTW Signal has a backup feature in the client (beta). Though can't say more about how it works since its a feature I do not need.

[jhasse]

Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.

If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.

[maqp]

>If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.

Why would people switch from always-end-to-end encrypted group chats to never-end-to-end encrypted group chats?

[jhasse]

Because they don't even know what e2e encryption is.

[Batman8675309]

Yes. Let's switch to an app with Russian connections that has actively refused to implement E2EE for over a decade now.

[jhasse]

Russian connections is FUD and Telegram has E2EE encryption, but not by default.

[Batman8675309]

Said E2EE is mobile only and completely unavailable in group chats

[expedition32]

My circle switched to Signal because we are concerned about tech bros and a fascist America.

Boosting Russia is not the solution.

[wolvoleo]

Telegram is not Russian. In fact Putin hates Pavel Durov.

[swiftcoder]

Without interoperability with the chat platform all the regular people are already using, that's always going to be an uphill battle.

I use Signal to communicate with other tech folks, but good luck convincing your dentist/doctor/etc to send reminders on signal instead of WhatsApp.

[sunshowers]

I talk to one of my doctors over Signal.

[xmcp123]

Everybody says this until there’s an alternative.

There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.

[zarzavat]

The alternatives suck.

WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).

Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.

[tonyhart7]

You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"

[expedition32]

Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated.

Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.

[chii]

> But that is marketing not coding.

it's the network effect.

If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.

[zarzavat]

If it's so easy to replicate, why isn't there any other app that has replicated it?

Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.

Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.

[bornfreddy]

Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?

[j1elo]

Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:

  Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/

I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.

[bornfreddy]

That sounds interesting, though a short search revealed this method is not very user friendly [0]. Still, if it works... Thank you!

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/11oiwse/working_a...

[computerfriend]

Signal has exports.

[neves]

Which non hacker news user exports chats?

I'm the only person I know who ever did it.

[popol12]

They released cloud backups recently and I believe they are also working on manual exports on iOS too

[Scarblac]

There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.

[prmoustache]

> agreed upon

That is the main issue.

There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.

The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.

[anonzzzies]

I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.

I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).

[maqp]

>working on all devices makes it very nice.

Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.

[anonzzzies]

I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?

Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.

[maqp]

>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat

You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.

>I guess you are from Ukraine?

Nope.

>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly

The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.

When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.

[anonzzzies]

There are many unfriendly apps on that light? insta chat, messenger, slack, discord, teams? and all of those are terrible software as well (slow, high mem etc); at least telegram is fast.

anyway, the point was not to use or endorse telegram, or the garbage i mentioned, but strive for e2ee while fast and usable.

I would sign up for anything e2ee but yeah ideally open source and hosting owned by an EU company.

[prmoustache]

> Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/e

What about Deltachat/Arcanechat?

[joe_mamba]

You realize that at the end of your sentence you've contradicted everything you've said from the start until that point, right?

Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.

[kelvinjps10]

It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family

[ExoticPearTree]

> Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps

Are you on some funny medication or something? ROTFL.