The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Here’s what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it.
The only American software I run is FOSS. I’ve got no problems with FOSS devs of any country. American corporations are the swollen sore on your lip you keep biting. Get rid of them and the world’s your oyster.
I’ll never understand the hold whatsapp has on people
The network effect: If everyone you ever message is there and stays there, it’s hard to leave…
Yeah, it’s pretty clear from a sociological perspective: what’s the point of a messaging app you cannot use to message anyone?
I swear sometimes Lemmy people need to go out a bit more often.
I think it’s more that Lemmy folks assume a lot of universal context from what they know. So maybe get out more and need to interact with humans, but also experience more of the world.
Some American that only uses iMessage will have no idea what entire continents of people use Whatsapp more than anything else, including to just make calls.
Fr omg, it’s like they can’t comprehend having a social life
It’s not even whatsapp specifically. I used to live in a place that only did Viber. Which is just Whatsapp with ads, themed purple. Everyone was on it, and people on whatsapp were maybe 50/50 at best. But without Viber, you didn’t exist and couldn’t message anyone and expect a response.
Here in south america you NEED whatsapp to being able to get a job. That plus the HR appas companies are pushing towards workers for even more data harvesting.
Go split your emails over 3 different clients and open only some in 1 and others in another.
For me it’s no big deal but centralisation feels good in lots of circumstances.
I’ll never understand the hold any of these apps have on people.
Some people actually have a social life and that often requires texting people that aren’t just your close friends you could convince of switching to Signal
It’s physchology I think.
People who feel they need to have regular communal celebration of their every thought and act really struggle to consider losing a few contacts who refuse to move to better alternatives. People who are happy to recieve the same ego strokes through fewer closer peers are ok with the move.
Same with leaving Facebook, Twitter, etc…
With messaging apps unless the new app does something new they want, people won’t even think about it. Here in Spain the only other app is telegram because it has a bunch of extra things, if the new app does the same why bother. A year ago I installed Signal, only three of my contacts were there and no one else has appeared since.
Edit: I just checked, now I have 8 contacts on Signal. Yay! Maybe there is hope
Here (Netherlands) basically all our family and friends app groups moved to Signal. Only some groups with parents of the kids’ school class, or colleagues, stubbornly keep clinged to whatsapp. For most cases, some negative news items about whatsapp/Meta/zuckerberg with regards to privacy and/or Zuckerbergs Trump-fetisjism, created enough momentum to move at least half of the group to another app (signal in this case). Afterwards, FOMO usually does the job in getting the other people over as well.
Why use WhatsApp over SMS and calls? It works regardless of country and phone service provider, and enable group conversations.
Why WhatApp over mail ? It allow calls and groupchats. It is slightly more practical due to its interface being based on SMS and calls rather than being baised on mails. But mostly, a big difference is a matter of habit: It is considered socially acceptable to check your mails “only” once or twice a day, it’s a remain from the time when you could only check your mails on your desktop, and obviously you weren’t gonna have your computer on you all the time. SMS, however, came with cellphones, and were intended from the start to be more instant. And because WhatApp and other instant messaging services are based on that, there’s more of an intuitive idea that they should be something you check and answer to more often. Emails, meanwhile, have taken a more formal function. Their main advantage is that they’re kept long term by default, so you use them for any interaction of which you want to be sure to leave a trace, and these are often work or money related stuff, for which a more constructive and formal answer is expected.
Now, why WhatApp rather than any other similar messaging service? Simple, they got a good marketting and timing. An even bigger budget went into promotting them when facebook/meta acquire them. This occured at a time when internet was getting more accessible in the global south through cellular network, and it quickly became the standart there, while already well intrenched it the imperial core (though with more competition). Unlike emails, SMS or IRC, WhatsApp is centralized, you need to go through them to communicate with another WhatsApp user, so once they got ahead, it was hard to dethrone them. The worth service made only for communication depends largely on the amount of people it allows you to communicate with. You can use Signal, Telegram, IRC, Matrix or whatever you want, but if everyone you want to talk to uses WhatsApp and some of them are abroad or don’t have a phone subscription with illimited SMS and calls, you’re still gonna have to use WhatApp to talk to them.
And then, there’s the question of groupchats. Many organizations, associations, classes or even workplaces have one of these. And while there are alternatives, WhatApp is a leader in that sector. And once again, an individual can’t chose what service the groups around them use and have to conforme themself to it.
You can replace Windows by Linux, find or make your own Nextcloud server to dump google Drive, add to that a searxng instance to dump google search, an email server maybe, and any social media that is mostly for leasurely interactions with strangers can be replaced if you’re willing to switch a set of strangers for another. These are all individual choices you can make without enganging anyone else. But it is hard to dump a tool you use to communicate with a large amount of specific people.
I kinda feel like all dumb phones have to do is ship with an Signal client, the lack of WhatsApp was apparently the driving reason why the reporter went back and I think its more reasonable to expect friends to move to Signal than to SMS. (Its also really unsecure)
There are a couple of community made clients I wonder how hard it is to implement the signal protocol.It’s open. Just compile your own client. Though it’s be allowed on the Signal network. So you have speed up a server too. American and open isn’t a problem.
Signal is American too though
I mean tbh it feels like the EU is putting more pressure on private chats than America does, at least right now. I am not sure how things are in Asia. I think the bigger problem is their reliance on AWS if Bezos or some friend of his does not want Signal to be a thing they can probably just switch it off fairly easy.
True, but it’s not owned by privacy enemy and trump slave Zuckerberg, or a similar big tech bro
To be fair, I recently discovered RCS messages. Very cool. I’ve been using those quite a bit recently and with many people I do not need Whatsapp anymore.
I did try RCS with a couple of friends and its great.
The only problem I have with it is the same I have with WhatsApp is that I cannot make sure what is happening on the server side (or even on the client side for that matter if its closed source) and what they are doing with the meta data. It seems like they would still be able to map out with whom I talk to and when (even if the content is encrypted which is not the default with RCS i believe).
Messages are end to end encrypted, I believe it is by default.
Google definitely has some metadata if you use the android app, at the very least the list of your contacts.
Regarding who you talk to, maybe: messages do not necessarily go through the servers of Google, it depends whether your carrier has their own servers.
Either way, I do see this as a great advantage over Whatsapp: while this system is still mostly controlled by Google the underlying technology most definitely is designed for decentralization and I know quite a few carriers are beginning to support it.
You can’t use RCS without Google, though.
Can’t use WhatsApp without Meta. What’s your point?
The point is not relying on US tech. It’s in the title.
The person went back to the smartphone in order to use WhatsApp. I feel RCS is a better option as it doesn’t strictly need Google, the reason why it is google is that google has developed the only application which supports RCS.
I am confused as to why they went with a dumb phone. Why not go with a non american degoogled android phone? Or to even go a step further, get a sailfish OS powered phone.
The narrator did not want to buy things just for an experiment.
Notice this sentence (emphasis mine):
On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland.
Pardon me if I am being presumptuous but the title seem to imply that the author was going to use somewhat equivalent non US alternatives rather than rummaging through what they already own.
To use an analogy, it is as if you have an article titled “I survived 72 hours without eating processed foods” and the author opted not to buy non processed alternatives and just work with with whatever they have at their home. Then you learn it was a couple of onions and a tomato they had in the fridge. If they say they were starving by the end of the experiment, it does not really paint an honest picture of how hard it is to get by without processed foods.
I believe the title and the article were written by different people
