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Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#791

Post by aaomidi »

maya24 wrote: post #709
aaomidi wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building and maintaining a super fast searching index on a phone is not an easy task or even doable. Telegram is used a lot in developing countries which are using phones made 3-7 years ago. Or phones that are made recently but with old chips and tech. Maintaining a search index across literally millions or billions (some groups are really really big) messages isn't something your phone can reasonably do. I do wish t…

This is patently false. Local indexing and search will always outperform a network call

How are you indexing literally billions of messages on tiny mobile devices? What happens when you wipe your device and you want to have your chat history from before? How do you download all the previous chat messages? Who hosts the chat index?

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#793

Post by aaomidi »

Nitramp wrote: post #675
aaomidi wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building and maintaining a super fast searching index on a phone is not an easy task or even doable. Telegram is used a lot in developing countries which are using phones made 3-7 years ago. Or phones that are made recently but with old chips and tech. Maintaining a search index across literally millions or billions (some groups are really really big) messages isn't something your phone can reasonably do. I do wish t…

Assuming a message is 200 bytes or so, searching millions of messages is trivially doable on your phone (200 MB full text index). Billions is pushing it a bit, but you can work around on the app level (e.g. only index the last month in high traffic groups).

How do you handle message history? Do you download every single old message to your device? Who hosts these messages? How are the backups handled?

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#794

Post by theshrike79 »

lrvick wrote: post #67
tlarkworthy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's good enough for organised criminals and to anger various governments, it's good enough for me

Don't forget Apple pressured Telegram to remove rooms or be banned. This type of pressure on centralized systems is exactly why it is unethical as technologists to suggest people centralize the internet. When you choose to send friends to centralized systems you are voting for the internet to have all the problems and advantages of dictatorships. When you support open decentralized protocols you get the problems and…

> Don't forget Apple pressured Telegram to remove rooms or be banned.

Apple pressured Telegram to remove specific posts. There was no way to stop spamming the posts, so they removed the whole channel because it was a lot easier.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#795

Post by rodolphoarruda »

logifail wrote: post #724
tobib wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you all for shining a light on this. I didn't know this was so bad. I'm simply annoyed that some social groups use Facebook to organize, our neighborhood group, the parenting class, so I just can't be a part of that and try to move individual people, like my immediate neighbors, onto other platforms. But "bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications", that's extreme. At least for bills and…

> parent teacher communications Where we are (EU) schools have been told not to touch WhatsApp, so official school-parent communication goes via other channels. However parents still end up creating WhatsApp groups for each class to exchange messages and chase lost bits of homework and so on. Feels like it's almost like like a virus ...

> parent teacher communications

Yes, that one is another good example.

My kids' school has 3 different learning management systems (not integrated, BTW) to which students need to submit their homework/assignments. Well, at least in theory.

In practice, parents take photos of homework and send them to teachers via Whatsapp completely ignoring a formal system maintained for that purpose. Poor teachers have to save the time to upload files from their phones/computers to the system later and keep things organized from school's internal perspective.

I thought about proposing to school's IT that they changed the process, allowing parents to email files to a certain inbox, which an app would collect the files later and push them into the system automatically. I ended up not going ahead with the proposal because I already knew their reaction to me: "Whatsapp makes the process simpler".

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#797

Post by MattJ100 »

ColinWright wrote: post #781
BasicObject wrote: post #774

XMPP.

I've had that response several times, but XMPP is not a messaging app. It's like asking for an email client and being told "Use the internet", or "Use TCP". Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking. What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?

Quicksy is a decent jump from WhatsApp to XMPP for Android users (based on Conversations, but with contact discovery). For iOS there's Siskin or Monal.

XMPP has a wide and diverse ecosystem. I am working on curating a suite of XMPP software (a server you can self-host, and an app for each major platform) to produce a single tightly integrated "XMPP package": https://snikket.org/ (and https://snikket.org/about/goals/ for an idea of current progress).

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#799

Post by soupson »

apexalpha wrote: post #155

Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.

There is a middle ground between taking your ball and going home and playing by the new rules without complaint.

Adding another app — my vote goes to Signal - and making a lot of noise on WhatsApp is one option. If I recall correctly, WhatsApp has statuses. Changing yours to “Keeping WhatsApp for business transactions only — find me on Signal for private chat” is one idea. The people on this board have the power to move their friends away from terrible software. Use it.

Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

#800

Post by rglullis »

Siira wrote: post #788
rglullis wrote: post #228

From the listed alternatives, only Matrix is the one that actually solves the issue of not having to trust our communications to any single monopolistic entity. You could add XMPP there as well, but it really doesn't matter. What does matter is for us to start pushing for openness and start evangelizing/helping others to adopt anything that puts us back in control of our communication. This is the one thing to fix, a…

> we can fix it This "we" is nonexistent. It will never reach mainstream usage with its current bad UI/UX, and people have not fixed it. I don't think it will ever reach feature parity.

> This "we" is nonexistent

Really? It just happened to spring into existence? No people working on it? No alternative clients?

> It will never reach mainstream usage.

Quit the defeatist BS, please. Linux is never going to be a mainstream desktop OS, yet many people have been using for decades already and are free from proprietary systems. No "feature parity"? Give it time and understand that freedom comes at a price. Do not sell yourself for convenience.

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