Signal is American too though

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.

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.

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.

Some people actually have a social life and that often requires texting people that aren’t just your close friend you could convince of switching to Signal

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.

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.

The network effect: If everyone you ever message is there and stays there, it’s hard to leave…

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…

I’ll never understand the hold any of these apps have on people.