Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

birdy.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 517 posts

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#331

Post by zrm »

fooker wrote: post #318
neves wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> It's not a technical problem How do you do encryption?

A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com 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.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#332

Post by rippeltippel »

palata wrote: post #136
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's very similar, companies can't - AFAIK - be registered in USA, they're registered in a state. USA's States have different tax and legislative climates, just like EU states do.

It's not. Part of Russia is in Europe. The geographical limit between Europe and Asia is not well defined. I think it would be similar to saying "First American chat app that...", which would be ambiguous?

It Is fair to say that "Europe" is a proxy for "European Union", like "America" is usually understood as "United States of America", without any precise geographic connotation.

Their service operates in the European Economic Area, which includes more countries than the EU and is therefore closer to the European geographic surface.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#333

Post by stef25 »

hei-lima wrote: post #197
prmoustache wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any WhatsApp user in the region The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to…

> SMS

Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#334

Post by miki123211 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #290
xvedejas wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.

> My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over d…

Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#335

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chii wrote: post #293
expedition32 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Being implacably stubborn is underrated. People can trivially have two messaging apps on their phone, which means they can all still contact you while using WhatsApp with other people. Then they all slowly end up with Signal on their phone, at which point who needs WhatsApp at all?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#336

Post by velocity3230 »

amelius wrote: post #199

When can I send messages from a PC running Python?

In a roundabout way, you can.

Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#337

Post by velocity3230 »

My_Name wrote: post #221

Let me know when I can link it to the hundred whatsapp groups other people have added me to, so I can remove the stain of zuckerberg from as much of my life as possible.

Install a Matrix client and run a WhatsApp bridge and you can.

Is it trivial? No.

Is it possible? Yes, I do it.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#339

Post by miki123211 »

krzyk wrote: post #320
prmoustache wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any WhatsApp user in the region The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.

It is an unique feature. Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.

"on your own Continent" != "in the EU."

Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#340

Post by franga2000 »

stef25 wrote: post #333
hei-lima wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to…

> SMS Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp

Here in EU even the 5 €/month phone plans have unlimited SMS. As soon as you want to talk to someone without Whatsapp, you need to figure out which other apps they're on. Completely useless compared to SMS

Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?

Post reply on HN