> forcing these apps to be able to federate

I predict it'll 'work' so that the companies aren't fined by the EU, but the service will be atrocious.

You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work.

"Warning: Sending an animated emoji will eject all non-iMessage users out of this group conversation".

> You'll probably have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work, and even then you'll probably have to wait 5 minutes for messages to be delivered, have to deal with bugs galore, and have most of the features not work.

Traditionally the EU is not amused by companies trying to cleverly work around its competition laws. I fully expect long trials with significant fines following the introduction of this law and hopefully things should settle for the better in a couple of years.

Traditionally, the EU is eroding their market and terrible at writing laws. You can’t legislate product decisions. That’s not what people actually want.

As Facebook and their suits illustrate, you can’t always run an international and feature-full service with their laws. The requirements for federation will probably devolve to an email or SMS fallback or just a lack of service offered. Big companies that don’t want to retreat at the risk of market share will totally provide lip service to the rules and implement the exact letter of the law and nothing more.

I expect that the EU taking this and other action will be a lot like the GDPR: solving a problem and providing a few solutions but basically none of the vision. The GDPR mandates data-exporting out of a service with the idea of portability. Except no one offers imports so there’s no real portability gained, just auditability (which is nice).

I do agree that I expect long trials and significant fines. The EU will look good politically for taking a stand to those big American companies. Those big American companies will maybe write a big check but certainly appeal for a decade.

Maybe it won't come down to legislation, but rather the threat of legislation. Maybe this is the sort of threat that will force companies to talk to one another and preemptively seek some sort of federation. Maybe they will be incentivized to do the right thing before it goes to court. At the very least, this is disruption of the status quo.

> A few of the more privacy conscious use Telegram or Signal.

Here in Germany, almost everyone I know is on Signal. That is not privacy conscious people or even tech-affine ones, almost everyone uses it in addition to WhatsApp. WA is mainly used when it works better (in bad connection situations, something that is embarrassingly relevant in Germany, Signal messages sometimes don’t work without an indication of it happening, WA messages just work) or a special feature is needed (live location sharing).

I'll ask this here...

I haven't touched any 3rd party messaging app, and I'd like to have my family start using one. But I'd like one that works on desktop as well... windows and linux. Does Signal, Telegram, or the others let you do that without jumping through hoops?

Telegram works pretty smoothly in that regard. The desktop apps are fully featured; the only thing you have to use a phone for is the initial signup.

You just have to give up E2EE if you use telegram and want chats sync'd across your devices.

> The fragmentation of these third party apps gets frustrating very fast though.

Agreed, although where I live, most people have consolidated on Telegram. WhatsApp was popular about 5 years ago, but its popularity has quickly waned because of how difficult inter-device use is.

> because of how difficult inter-device use is.

Huh? What is difficult there?

several.. truth is that whatsapp was made to be used in one device only and is not frindly to be used in multiple devices at the same time.

Until recently (like days ago) you still needed the main device to be online and connected to their server to use the both the web or desktop apps, although for some time there was a beta going for the feature they released a few days ago where that is "no longer required".

Even so, i was on the beta of the new feature where you could use the web or desktop app without the phone since it started and it has its quirks.. Often it fail to load either the history or even new messages, messages sent on the main device often do not show in the web\desktop app and performance is overall terrible.

Also there is still no official way to have the same whatsapp across multiple phone\tablets devices.

Never had issues with the beta (before it, I simply did not use WA), but then I also never used it heavily.

> Also there is still no official way to have the same whatsapp across multiple phone\tablets devices.

That seems dumb. Luckily not an issue for me.

Yeah, it is completely dumb, but it is what it is..

The problem is that whastapp is old and it was first designed those decisions made sense..

the only other option around was SMS but it was expensive in many countries.. So now you had the option to pay a few dollars to buy the whatsapp (yeah, had to pay for it back then) and you could send SMS-like messages for free..

That is why it is so widespread in many countries, because it was a cheap alternative to SMS..

It was designed as a replacement for SMS and many of the early technical decisions that are limiting then today were made with that in mind..

One phone number = one phone = one whatsapp account

that is no longer the case today but they have to deal with the technical debts of those early decisions..

AFAIK all the other alternatives available today came much later with a completely different mind set, so they do not have those same limitations..

WhatsApp was a pain to use on multiple devices. For a long time you needed the main phone to be connected nearby. I also lost my whole history when I went from Android to iOS for a silly technical reason. Really annoying.