Google is the next company that will come under heavy scrutiny. They are aggressively trying to circumvent ad-blockers with their recent usage of semi-random domains.
You can’t abuse ordinary people’s privacy and shove ads in people’s face for too long time.
I also use this list to temporarily add HN when I want to focus. This setup works well for me.
Some of my family members and friends use WhatsApp and that's something I regret (tiny bit) not using. But I don't miss Facebook, Instagram, etc. at all.
[1] https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
I stopped using Facebook (though still use Instagram and Whatsapp) and my life is much the same as it was before.
And here's the secret - I'm not even loyal to Instagram or Whatsapp, more to the network.
If friends fall off Facebook, then there's even less reason to go. In fact, Instagram has entirely replaced it for me.
And if Photos on iOS had a public sharing feature, I'd probably just use that, and then fall off Instagram too.
It kinda does. You can make an album public and it generates a link that you can share.
Not to mention their open source projects; we use fb prophet a lot for our ML
And even my mother has installed Threema on her phone because a friend of her asked for it. This tells you something. It is hard to come up with another social network like facebook. But a chatting client on the phone? The tide can change very fast there.
Threema gets used more in Europe than in the states. But even a US buddy recently suggested we switch to threema. It is closed source but claims to offer more privacy.
Yes, it actually is that difficult to program. To scale to WhatsApp's level, you can't just base all your message-delivery off a Kafka cluster and be done with it. Amazon Chime still hasn't been deployed outside of us-east-1 and seems nowhere close to a global deployment.
The engineering effort to provide low-latency communications, at geographic and user scale, is very much non-trivial.
People use Whatsapp because that's what everyone else uses. I would prefer Signal but no one I know uses it.
Everyone I know uses Whatsapp.
So I use Whatsapp.
Nobody I know uses WhatsApp. So I don’t use WhatsApp.
See how that works?
The anecdote is supposed to show why one can't just write their own app. It doesn't work that way.
Consider that you're a distant outlier.
You just naturally remember, like you would remember where your friends live. I guess if you are constantly dealing with "contacts" rather then friends it would get confusing.
I use
1. WeChat
2. WhatsApp
3. Threema
4. Frozenchat, a Jabber client with OTR support
Don't have signal yet.
Ah, and I can "chat" via Text message too :-)
2. global leader right now
3. as compromised as whatsapp,has data compliance with multiple countries
4. no name fork of a no name
2. correct
3. Multiple countries? You would need a court order from Switzerland. I am not even sure they can access your messages if they wanted to.
4. Irrelevant because it is a client to an open protocol. Which client you use does not matter. I just named mine.
Interesting - when did you last evaluate / buy a phone based on voice quality capabilities?
A very large percentage of the country never makes international calls.
Strawman. The article's writer can do better than view Facebook as a one trick pony. It is an internet behemoth. Instagram aside, there is so much media sharing on WhatsApp alone that it might blow away most of the other internet properties away. WhatsApp with VoIP now has the mobile network operators by their balls. No one is logging out of that, by far.
> Some empires fall because they’re invaded from the outside or rot from within. Zuckerberg’s could be the first in history to collapse simply because its citizens logged out.
Couldn't be further from the truth. People might get dis-interested in Facebook, over time... but existence of Facebook is more than folks just logging out.