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It's time to stop texting

dfeldman.medium.com

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#51

Post by pipeline_peak »

> people you don’t know, at multiple companies can read all of your messages, without any hacking or special technology. Your chats are there to read, maybe even by accident, like a postcard passing through a post office.

As opposed to Facebook seeing my messages and selling data? What am I not understanding here?

You can’t have privacy and still communicate through any form of instant messaging. Don’t tell me about some oss platform that no one uses.

I text because I don’t like social networking sites. If my message fails to send, I get an error. I don't get to send gifs, high quality photos, or see when people are typing back but that's a small price.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#52

Post by adam_arthur »

crazcarl wrote: post #44
adam_arthur wrote: post #11

People would stop texting if there were a common protocol for messaging not on SMS. I'm sure they exist, but until WhatsApp can communicate with WeChat etc, texting is unlikely to go away. This is one of the few areas where government mandated bridges may be required to allow for interoperability.

Maybe I'm being naive, but isn't that just email?

If chat apps all used email as the backbone to their messaging, sure.

The exact spec doesn’t matter, what matters is that chat apps all work off some single interoperable spec

Re: It's time to stop texting

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: It's time to stop texting

#55

Post by somat »

faddyfadfad wrote: post #33
mongol wrote: post #18

SMS is from an era when the focus was on protocols, not apps. Unfortunately that era seem unlikely to return.

"Unfortunately"? How do you figure?

Unfortunate because with a protocol first mindset interoperability is easy, the app first mindset makes interoperability almost impossible.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#57

Post by Sakos »

ryandrake wrote: post #34
adam_arthur wrote: post #11

People would stop texting if there were a common protocol for messaging not on SMS. I'm sure they exist, but until WhatsApp can communicate with WeChat etc, texting is unlikely to go away. This is one of the few areas where government mandated bridges may be required to allow for interoperability.

It still boggles my mind that here we are in 2023, and we still don't have a way to universally and interoperably.... "send text over the Internet to someone in real time". This should be dead simple. Yet, every chat app is still incompatible with every other chat app, and no company evidently sees any value in fixing this. And, whenever a new chat app emerges, lo and behold, it's also incompatible with every other c…

We were nearly there 20ish years ago. Then everything turned into a walled garden. We've somehow regressed in significant ways since the 90s and early 2000s.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#58

Post by andrewfromx »

smcin wrote: post #15
andrewfromx wrote: post #4

I still remember the day when it dawned on me that everyone, like even cool people, could get SMS messages. It was that tipping point when enough people had phones 24/7 and suddenly it wasn't a very nerdy thing to do. Pre this time, the idea of sending an email to ask someone out for a date for example was just laughable. But a txt? It was very different. Still to this day if you meet someone new and get "their numbe…

What year was that tipping point, IYO? in the US

IMO 1999

Re: It's time to stop texting

#59

Post by cortesoft »

schvenk wrote: post #14
nerdjon wrote: post #10

I understand the concerns that they are bringing up, but I feel like saying just download another app completely misses the point of my SMS is so popular. It is just... there. It does what I need it to do without standing in my way of communicating. It is also a standard that is not at the whim of a specific company shutting down a major service (that I am aware of) to continue communicating. I struggled for a while…

(Original author here) I agree with everything you said. SMS is popular for excellent reasons that are hard to overcome at this point. I wrote the article not because I expect it to create a behavioral shift at scale, but for the folks who, if they knew more, might care enough to do something—who agree with me that while sticking with SMS is easier than switching, maybe the benefits of switching are great enough to j…

The problem I have is that no matter what, the decision to use something besides SMS/iMessage is going to be a decision to use more than one messaging app. Even if you are a great persuader and are able to get all of your friends and family to switch to your new app (which is never going to happen either), you are STILL going to need to use SMS for all sorts of things (new contacts, businesses, etc).

Re: It's time to stop texting

#60

Post by vlunkr »

below43 wrote: post #40
nerdjon wrote: post #10

I understand the concerns that they are bringing up, but I feel like saying just download another app completely misses the point of my SMS is so popular. It is just... there. It does what I need it to do without standing in my way of communicating. It is also a standard that is not at the whim of a specific company shutting down a major service (that I am aware of) to continue communicating. I struggled for a while…

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 wonder what would have to happen for iMessage to get adopted as a standard, or a similar standard to replace it. It's such a great technology, it's a tragedy that Apple has an iron grip on it.
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