> 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends
Bring them back to email, because there are still many small email providers in the UK. See https://delta.chat/en/ for email as IM.
Re:The metaverse is bullshit
by dicknuckle on Saturday October 30, 2021 @11:36AM
(#29049600)
or just use Signal. people around me have been flocking to it from WhatsApp, I even got my wife on it.
Signal is just another centralized service; email is a standard. You can self-host it, a company can make internal-only servers, etc. Signal disallows even custom clients, let alone real self-hosting.
I agree, while (at least in younger people) messenger is declining, Instagram is basically the only platform you can contact everyone you known on. They want to be the major player in virtual reality communication, VR Chat for the masses. While incorporating large scale advertising into the pitch
> Instagram is basically the only platform you can contact everyone you known on
Forgive my ignorance but I thought Instagram was just a place to upload random photos.
It also has a chat, and for many it has become the main channel to stay in touch with each other. I'm not sure why either, I guess it's because they spend more time in the app than other messengers, so they might as well chat on it too.
Eh, IMO I don't think that would have worked - I suspect it would have raised too much anti-trust attention and not have been allowed.
The bigger picture is that in the UK at least, 'Meta' owns most communication channels that I use to communicate with my friends. TikTok isn't really a replacement to insta/whatsapp/Facebook, it's a replacement to Youtube.
I think Facebook is using the 'metaverse' as a metaphor to mean 'Facebook owning all forms of communication, as much as possible, both traditional messanger/audio but also extending into the real world as much as possible, and new media'. In that case, I think the metaverse is a much broader play (that nobody else can easily make, and that probably raises even more concerns!).