I’ve been seeing this more and more in comments, and it’s got me wondering just how big this issue really is. A lot of people feel trapped in apps like Discord, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but can’t get their friends to leave.
It’s really annoying when you suggest trying something new, whether it’s a different app or just not using these platforms so much but sometimes it can feel like no one wants to go first.
So I’m curious, what apps do you feel most trapped in? And have you tried convincing your friends to leave them? What happened? Is it an issue for you, or are you just going along with the flow?
Looking forward to hearing if this is as common as it feels!
I don’t have very many friends, although of the ones I do have the majority of them use Signal, or are terrified of recent politics and I’m trying to move them over currently. I’m not concerned about platform lock-in for communicating over proprietary platforms since if something happens we can just move, I am concerned about the security implications.
I think for my friends it’s just what we have been using for literally a decade since we were kids, combined with apathy towards privacy - although of my friends does use duckduckgo. I don’t judge them for that since I’ve been pretty bad with privacy. I do worry if we get into more activism that we will need to secure our privacy
Because people keep pushing for them to completely leave a platform.
Instead try to get them to dual-use platforms.
One of the big problems nowadays is proprietary protocols. Back in the day, you could have a single client that could talk to different networks. Today you have to run a bunch of separate apps, and what’s worse is that a lot of them are built with stuff like Electron that’s resource hungry.
Even the FOSS apps don’t all get along.
Conversations is great for XMPP, and it can act as a UnifiedPush pusher, but AFAICT it doesn’t support other protocols and it doesn’t act as a UnifiedPush subscriber.
So running 2 chat protocols, one being the well-support app Conversations on the well-supported protocol XMPP, means 2 push setups and 2 apps. Bleh.
I would like to see an architecture where the expensive app side of things is separated from the protocol. But that’s all speculative, I haven’t put work hours into it. Basically, if I have an idea for P2P chat, why do I need to re-invent emojis and channels and shit like that? I only want to iterate on transport. And if I have a better idea for channels, why would I have to re-invent the transport like XMPP and Matrix?
(The reason is that cutting those two apart is hard - But I will continue to wonder.)
Oh yeah the whole thing is a mess. It kind of blows my mind that we still don’t have a single common protocol that at least the open source world agrees on. Like there is a more or less fixed set of things chat apps need to do, we should be able to agree on something akin to ActivityPub here as a base.
This is the way. I this case they get to “feel” those other options themselves, and even if you are the one that put that seed in their head, they are the ones making that final decision based on their own needs, capabilities and preferences.
Understanding why those platforms are bad is another layer of thought that most people aren’t capable or willing to engage in.
These are just opinions, but here are the two I know about (I don’t use WhatsApp)
Discord: It’s not just you. You would have to get their other connections, all their servers, and all the connections from those servers to switch. Frankly speaking, Revolt isn’t ready for that to happen. You are one person. I’m sorry, but if I have 1 friend vs. all of my servers and friends, I’m not going to make a meaningful change for the one person. And tbh I’m more likely to be the one than the many. What I would suggest is to try and put yourself between the two services, help to build the communities you want to see, then invite people over.
Instagram: Same issue as Discord. The fediverse doesn’t have the variety of content, the wide range of users, or half the stuff to engage with.
“privacy? Yeah whatever, they just use it to catch bad people right? I have nothing to hide. I don’t have the time to learn all this VPN stuff. Don’t forget to like my posts!”
Don’t forget to like my posts!”
FBI Likes This
So like, this is always seemingly done from a content CONSUMER point of view.
How can we provide content creators a safety net whom we as fans enjoy their content but said artists need to have their name and face out in the open? Particularly music artists/DJs/independent artists/etc?
I swear, anyone wanting privacy, just start calling yourself an artist and boom suddenly nobody can find any information about you! You don’t even have to be serious about it, just take a crayola to a bar napkin… /s
I think the way we are trying to make technology sound sophisticated and our refusal to reinvent language makes technology become much less accessible than what they should be.
Like this, I think letting irrelevant tech talk hijack the conversation makes privacy inaccessible. We need to call it what it is: a scam, abuse, and hijacking of our control.
The crux is that all the alternatives suck. I don’t have a problem going App hopping, I just have a very hard time finding ones that don’t fundamentally suck, and I am not talking about little implementation issue, but garbage like Signal that violates the GDPR, wants your phone number and is proud of it. Always grinds my gears when that gets celebrated as the “alternative”. Same with the Fediverse, where user owns nothing and server operator controls everything, how again is that different from Reddit, Facebook and Co.?
Nostr and Tox seem ok so far, but really the amount of true alternatives that improve on the original in significant ways is pretty damn rare.
People don’t typically like change. It has to feel like it’s their decision to drive them there.
What are some good alternatives to discord?
matrix works pretty well as a discord replacement, it’s sometimes unreliable when you’re using a selfhosted instance but I’d wager it’d work smooth enough for a non techie if you turn off end to end encryption
if you turn off end to end encryption
isn’t that the main reason to use it though, privacy?
imo the biggest appeal is decentralisation and non corporate ownership, ofc the matrix people are trying their best to do e2ee and whatnot but iirc media isn’t encrypted e2e and it’s inferior to signal or whatever
also for a large fraction of discord’s usage (large open access guilds) encryption doesn’t mean anything
It’s network effects. People have other friends on the network who have their own friends on the network, and so on. Leaving the network means convincing a critical mass of your network to leave along with you.
In other words, you say that we should just give up.
I’m simply explaining why it’s difficult for people to move from existing networks.
And it would be easier with good bridges, but of course the big platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., refuse to bridge in or out with anything.
You can scrape public Facebook feeds, using paid services, but AFAICT you need a friend on the inside to publish your stuff into Facebook.
I guess that’s one reason I shouldn’t complain about Bluesky - They support Bridgy.
Are there even public feeds anymore? Anytime I’ve gone to Facebook since deleting it wants me to login first, no matter what the link was to
Because their other friends are on them, and the celebrities they follow.
Yes, I understand. The annoying thing is that you end up with two or more apps for the same purpose. Mid-term, I think the only way to go is to go cold turkey at some moment, but it will costs you some friends and family contacts.
Asking people to leave things means they’re losing a line of communication to friends, family, and interest groups who still use those things. It’s probably more productive to ask people to add the services you prefer rather than leave the ones they’re used to.
I’ve encountered some resistance from Americans who use iPhones and hate the idea of adding a third-party messaging app. None of them seem very interested in justifying that position.
Companies like Apple spent a lot to create a switching cost in almost every product. The “bubble” color is also a HUGE thing in the US, and is often times the sole reason for not wanting to leave iMessage.
As someone whose only apple devices are ipads, the big lockin isn’t imessage vs an SMS client. It’s FaceTime vs, Zoom/GMeet/Jitsi. Mind you, it is nice being able to use iMessage with my wife when I have internet, and then swap over to SMS quickly. Sure, my two devices don’t have a persistent conversation, but her device does.
FaceTime vs, Zoom/GMeet/Jitsi
Is the advantage availability among your contacts, or something about the UX?
Holistically it’s UX.
If my wife or others in my life who use Apple want to contact me, they don’t have to go into a specific app and hope that I’m looking at it. They can go into iMessage, click the camera, and poof, a video call starts up. The only software I use that does that otherwise is Discord, and that’s not integrated with SMS/MMS. It’s the connection too (which is just as much part of UX) - I’ve had problems with Zoom or others due to connection strength, but not with FaceTime.
The fact that it’s a “just-works” solution is important.
Literally all of that UX is the same and better in other apps though.
For example, every single part of your description applies to video and text conversations with my SO and friends, except we all use Signal. It “just works”, and better than Facetime because it doesn’t matter what device my SO and friends have.
With Facetime it doesn’t “just work” at all with the large number of people I know who don’t have Apple. That’s a huge disadvantage which means that Facetime UX sucks.
they don’t have to go into a specific app and hope that I’m looking at it
Do the others not ring your phone? I don’t video call often, but when I do it’s usually with Signal, and that definitely rings my phone.
No, my phone (Android) usually has notifications/ringers muted
This sounds like a pretty unusual configuration. I don’t imagine most people can be reached more reliably using an app that only runs on their tablet than apps that run on their phone.
Certainly, but installing additional messaging apps on a phone has almost no cost on either iPhone or Android. It’s interesting that iPhone users seem to dislike the idea more.
The having to do something is the cost, because they have a perfectly good messaging app already, “why can’t you just use that?”
And that cost is more on Apple’s platform because Apple has been designing it that way since the beginning. It’s the whole reason android users got a different color bubble, not because they had to, but it was a way to identify the person that wasn’t using an iPhone and make them stand out. Making it almost unimaginable to switch to Android for youth who care so much about not being “out” of the group.
And Google has identified this, and put a lot of cringe-worthy effort into addressing it at their Pixel event this time around.
they have a perfectly good messaging app already, “why can’t you just use that?”
Only running on one brand of phone would be the obvious reason here. Installing an additional app seems like a slightly smaller ask than buying a different phone.
