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It's time to stop texting

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#121

Post by schvenk »

nerdjon wrote: post #39
theonlybutlet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the rest of the world the answer is simply Whatsapp. China it's WeChat. No need to discuss. You can also see if their contact is in the app.

The second one is such a horrible thing that I wish it was blocked by the OS. Stop giving apps access to your entire contacts! I did not consent to those companies knowing my phone number, name, and likely other information! But you clicked a little button that they can so its completely fine! \s That is likely my single biggest pet peeve of the current state of tech is other people being able to consent to MY inform…

Although note that with SMS, you're consenting to multiple phone companies knowing your phone number, name, and definitely other information in the form of all your messages. Possible I should have made that clearer in the original article: it doesn't make sense to me that someone would stick with SMS because they don't want Meta/Google/Apple/whoever to have their info, unless they truly believe that AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon/etc. are better stewards of our data. (And I don't mean to dunk on that latter group of companies here...I just don't have any reason to believe either group is better than the other.)

Re: It's time to stop texting

#122

Post by progman32 »

henrikschroder wrote: post #36
theonlybutlet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the rest of the world the answer is simply Whatsapp. China it's WeChat. No need to discuss. You can also see if their contact is in the app.

No, that is not true, and five seconds of googling could have told you that.

What did you find?

Re: It's time to stop texting

#123

Post by sp332 »

Groxx wrote: post #24
josephcsible wrote: post #16

There's one gigantic advantage to SMS that no alternative app has come close to matching: your phone number is yours, so even if Verizon decides to drop you as a customer, you can move to one of their competitors and still be able to receive messages from everyone you could before. If you use WhatsApp and Meta decides to ban you, you're out of luck unless you gave a second means of communication to everyone you used…

> your phone number is yours Unless you move out of their service area. Or a number of other caveats. Then they're not required to allow you to port your number, and telecoms rarely do anything user-friendly-but-internally-costly that they're not legally required to do.

In the USA, they are required to port your number. Since 2003 IIRC.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#124

Post by schvenk »

ploum wrote: post #118
LarryMullins wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very confusing to me that Europe seems generally skeptical of big American tech, but has evidently jumped straight into bed with Facebook's WhatsApp with far more enthusiasm than Americans.

Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp. Until recently, lot of people were ignoring that their whatsapp was part of facebook (but those people were also using facebook messenger anyway). Germany and Switzerland have some exotic secure messengers that were quite popular (and may still be) like threema. There was also some quite suprizing stuff. My inlaws were, until recently, usi…

Much as I would love an open standard to win here, their track record has not been great with respect to messaging. If someone (looking at you, Google) were to jump on board with one, that could change stuff.

But to be fair, most consumers aren't going to care about an open standard directly; they'll care about finding and chatting with their friends. An open standard is a great way to get there when it works, but, for example, WhatApp being a de facto standard in much of the world accomplishes the same thing in those regions.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#125

Post by spookthesunset »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #26
Rayhem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this feels a lot like saying "My god, people, stop using telephones! Facetime has video! And the bitrate ! It's a million times higher! It's 2023, why would anyone use a POTS call?!" Sure, nicer technical specs are...nice, but they're a far, far second to solving a problem. In an sms world: Problem: I need to contact a new acquaintance. Solution: Exchange phone numbers because everyone has them. Text. Or call.…

In the rest of the world the answer is simply Whatsapp. China it's WeChat. No need to discuss. You can also see if their contact is in the app.

I’m guessing but in these other countries were SMS messages cheap/free?

Re: It's time to stop texting

#126

Post by barbazoo »

afavour wrote: post #77

Yeah, sure, SMS sucks. But this article is missing the forest for the trees. In fact it writes off the trees entirely: > Switching platforms is a pain, and getting your friends to do it is even harder. I think the advantages are worth the pain in this case, but the pain is real. So make it easier and start small: find one friend who’s willing to experiment. Sign up together for Signal or Telegram, and take it for a s…

> The pros, cons and analysis of every alternative messaging service is fine but the simple fact remains that the vast majority of people will not switch because they have no problem with their current setup.

Hopefully people become more sensitive to privacy issues and will realize how bad SMS is in this regard. RCS doesn't seem to have standard way to e2ee messages either so I don't see that helping either.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#127

Post by sp332 »

jawns wrote: post #100

There are two things that keep my wife and me tethered to Google Chat as our primary means of texting each other: 1) Search. This is the big one. The fact that I don't even need to differentiate between email and chat when I need to search for something is highly valuable. Plus, its search functionality is just in general very solid. Go figure. 2) Integration into GMail. During the workday, it's more convenient for m…

If you use a Google Voice number, you can send and receive SMS messages with a phone number that also show up in your Gmail search.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#128

Post by stonogo »

I value my privacy too much to stop texting. This person demands I subject myself to the whims of some corporate software stack in order to achieve privacy, and I reject the thesis. I don't send private information via SMS and I don't use it for two-factor authentication. Despite all the whining about 'the network effect' and 'user friendliness' I've never had trouble arranging encrypted comms both in my personal and work lives.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#129

Post by torben-friis »

smcin wrote: post #20
torben-friis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (and millions of others worldwide) Where else do SMS remain common? At least here in Europe they've been relegated to automatic communications, like receiving 2-factor codes. No one uses them for messaging. I think the app of choice is different per country, but I haven't met any non American that's still used to SMS.

That's simply untrue. Tens or hundreds of millions of people in Europe still use SMS, for messaging. If you're trying to say X% of people under the age of Y tend to use WhatsApp(iMessage/IG/SC/Telegram/Signal) for messaging, then what are X and Y? and in which European countries (it varies).

At least in my country (Spain), it is not at all age related. No one uses sms for communication. I just checked a local source and Whatsapp usage is 97% among the young lowering to 87% among the 70+ group, with the practical totality of the others choosing just calls or no phone usage.

If you know a European country where SMS are the norm, can you share which one? As I said, I don't know a single one, but they might exist.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#130

Post by schvenk »

nikeee wrote: post #64
below43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't think replacing SMS with a private company/single organisation as the messaging platform provider is the solution (which is why I also count out WhatsApp also, despite currently relying on it heavily to communicate with Android users). I think in the end we need a cross-platform messaging protocol that replaces SMS/MMS that is not reliant on a single app vendor, provides end-to-end encryption and will be…

I understand the desire to just use the default app. I feel the same for most of the stuff I use. However, being based on standards is more like being based on the lowest common denominator. Moxie describes the issue pretty good in his post where he explains why signal is not federated (any more): https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ When talking about things like encryption, RCS isn't that much better, i…

I fully agree the best outcome here would be a cross-platform, E2EE standard supported as the default across a variety of platforms. (Where iMessage would be a great option if Apple would play ball.) I'm just not holding my breath...and in the absence of that the best I could think to do is explain to whoever would listen why they can take action on their own behalf and that of their community.
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