I'm just gonna go ahead and mention [messenger.com](https://www.messenger.com/) for anyone who agrees with you and doesn't know about it. It's essentially the messenger app in the browser, so you can access your Facebook messages without even coming across the news feed, any ads, etc.

All I get is a big ad to install the app from Google Play.

messenger.com is for desktop only. On mobile, the Facebook Messenger app is standalone -- you don't need the Facebook app to use it.

Use “Request Desktop Site” in Chrome, or another app such as Hermit to use Messenger on Android through the browser.

There's a ton of reasons to not use Messenger.

1. The mandatory "seen" indicator

2. All of your messages are beholden to a private company, permanently stored in plaintext

3. They analyze said messages to deliver advertisements. Seriously, one time I mentioned buying a Samsung SSD to my friend in chat, and all of a sudden I got a ton of SSD advertisements on the sidebar. Same thing when I mentioned Rick and Morty.

4. It's Facebook, for crying out loud.

Most of these sound like reasons not to use Facebook in general.

While the seen indicator is a legitimate annoyance, it's been commonplace for some years now. I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have it.

As for the rest of your points, Facebook's money comes from ads. These concerns are not limited to chat, but using Facebook in general. As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

Every part of the service is designed to help them do this, saying that these are reasons to "not use Messenger" is missing the point. The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook. You just get to message friends, plain and simple. The benefit is you're not being enticed into scrolling your news feed, spammed with notifications about upcoming events etc.

Plus, there are rumours they're going to bring e2e encryption in a la Whatsapp, which would pretty much squash points 2 and 3.

It seems unlikely they'd bring the encryption in. I often have several messengers open. My phone, my tablet, my home desktop, my home laptop, my other home laptop, my work desktop, my work laptop. How will encrypting like Whatsapp keep that working? Some how they'll always be tunneling to my phone from all the various machines?

Also, as an alternative, Hangouts stores my chat history in gmail (opt in), so unlike Messenger/Line/Whatsapp I have a history of all my chats on Hangouts which I actually find very useful.

That said, 99% of my friends and family are on FB Messenger

I'm waiting for the next chat service to emulate the 'ytalk' and 'talkd' practice of the 1980s to echo all keystrokes to the other party as they're typed, rather than waiting for the user to press send.

"Instant Messaging" indeed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

There's a nice XMPP extension for that.

Spec: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0301.html Demos: http://www.realjabber.org/

Not that Google (or whoever) are going to implement it now...

> As you browse the web, Facebook is tracking you and using the data to deliver more relevant ads. As you comment and make posts, Facebook uses the data to deliver more relevant ads.

This is why Facebook is best used in an incognito-mode browser window.

[This is about desktop browser use]

I use multiple tabs with FB whenever I do have to use it, and private/incognito mode wouldn't work well for that scenario because it would force me to login in every tab. So instead I use normal mode with extensions to block ads, tracking cookies, social features on websites and Facebook Redirection (where clicks are handled by FB to track which site is being visited). This is with a combination of uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and a few others. That way, I get to have multiple FB tabs but don't see my profile in the comments section on another site to allow further tracking. Any link I visit from FB isn't exposed to FB either.

> I don't know of a modern chat app that doesn't have [the seen indicator].

I don't use those either. I stick to texting and iMessage.

> The point of using Messenger is that you're not tied to any other portion of Facebook.

You're tied to their ad platform. Whether you view those ads or not are up to you; but you are nonetheless tied to it. They analyze your private conversations with the eventual hope to manipulate you.

Problems of Messenger App (and not Facebook company): 1. Can't log out 2. Can't turn off the 'online' indicator 3. 'Seen' indicator

You can turn the seen indicators off in iMessage, fwiw.

>2. All of your messages are beholden to a private company, permanently stored in plaintext

>3. They analyze said messages to deliver advertisements. Seriously, one time I mentioned buying a Samsung SSD to my friend in chat, and all of a sudden I got a ton of SSD advertisements on the sidebar. Same thing when I mentioned Rick and Morty.

These are poor complaints, unless your circle of friends is so insular on the the (justifiably) paranoid side of tech that everyone is running their own mail servers and using GPG day to day.

You appear to have no problem with a company building up a profile of your likes and dislikes, so they can try and sell stuff to you. That's fine. Why expect that of others, though?

Because it is overwhelmingly what they deliver. The very edgiest of the edgy use Telegram 1-2% of the time. Exactly one person in my social network installed Signal and he gave up on it after about 2 days. No one would dream of touching GPG. The .5% of the time an email address does not end in @gmail.com, it is a Google Apps account.

Are your friends all Tor developers or something? I just can't imagine a set of family/friends/acquaintances who actually run their own Postfix and care what a public key is.

I'll accept the existence of an advertising profile (I don't see the ads, anyway) before I'lll cease all communication with everyone in my network, which is what it would take to avoid Facebook (or the exact same problem with a different company).

Am I the only person who is totally fine with just texting people? I mean, given this is HN, maybe all of you people use Android and have no idea how amazing iMessage is.

Regular SMS is among the least secure communication mechanisms available. I trust Facebook a thousand times more than Verizon.

iMessage is nice, but many of the people I converse with regularly aren't in the Apple ecosystem.

I mean, you're not wrong there, but personally I'd rather have my private conversations in the hands of Verizon than Facebook. Facebook actually sees the value in the private conversations and tries to monetize it. Verizon, on the other hand, has bigger fish to fry.

I'd rather give my conversations to a company that sees storing/processing messages as a liability, rather than an asset.

1. This is ubiquitous among chat apps. 2. This is not likely to remain the case for long, among rumors Messenger is adding end-to-end encryption. 3. There is no evidence they analyze messages for ads. Zero. All attempts to prove this have been disproven. 4. This is not an argument.

I was answering the question "Why not use Messenger?"

To answer that question, I opted to list personal reasons why I don't use it; reasons I'm sure are shared by many. Your response is basically telling me my experience and opinions are wrong.

Your "opinion" that Facebook analyzes Messenger text for ads is an unsubstantiated myth, and factually incorrect.

It is not factually incorrect. Sure, nobody could prove it with certainty, but you can't just dismiss it like that.

...Especially when you're trying to convince someone who saw it with their own two eyes.

5. Accesses and mines your phone book. (My rolodex is my business and no way FB or LI are getting it direct from me.)

I'm interested as to why someone like yourself, a likely tech-savvy HN user, the kind of person who notices how their chats effect ad serving, does not block ads on facebook. Care to share?

The ads are also embedded in the News Feed itself, in the form of "friend X likes Y page" and the like. I'd imagine it would require an ad blocker specifically designed for Facebook to block it. Same goes for the sidebar.

I don't use Facebook enough to care; uBlock Origin suits my needs just fine.

The embedded ads in the News Feed can also be blocked by a extension like uBlock Origin. The additional filter is found from ABP, if I recall.

Good to know, thanks.

Adblocking wouldn't address any of the four points that pikachu_is_cool raised.

For point 3, Facebook could still be analyzing the contents of messages.

Yah, I agree. But I'm still surprised that a adblocker/tracker blocker isn't used by that kind of individual.

An adblocker just treats the symptoms. I'd rather just not have the disease :)

> you have to bother to think up a good message to send them

Soon you may not have to! https://googleblog.blogspot.sg/2016/05/allo-duo-apps-messagi...

I'd never trust installing their apps on my phone. The Facebook app admittedly listens to the microphone. So Facebook messages will largely become a black hole for me too.