Interesting. By couching your skepticism in very dull (but no doubt accurate) legalese, you managed to avoid getting brigaded for effectively dissenting from the (also very dull) jaded-US-progressive groupthink in this community.

The danger of retaining one’s purity is that you risk forfeiting influence over what may (very well) happen anyway.

I’m a introvert even in Finnish standards lol.

“How can you tell if a Finn is an extrovert? While talking to you, he looks at your shoes and not his own.” Boom! You’ve probably heard it already.

depression

I’d be depressed if I had to endure the darkness of a Finnish winter.

They understood it, didn’t care. Meh. Fuck them, I guess lol.

TBH in principle I’m ready to give up on the Whatsapp boycott, it’s just so costly socially. I’ve lost out on a ton of connections at this point. Maybe nothing would have come of them but it’s such a high price to pay for a principle. And after all I use Telegram so I’m hardly pure.

BUT there’s a deal-breaker: WA demands physical access to a SIM, i.e. you can’t sign up with another number or even continue to use it without the ongoing SIM permission. This is just so outrageous (no other apps do it), and anyway I often change SIMs because of travel. The only workaround is to sign up for a business account (yes seriously) with a landline number, but if you try any funny business (like using a virtual landline number) you will get banned - and indeed I got banned! What a nightmare this damn app is. And also the dumbest name ever.

Whatsapp > Telegram tho, Telegram isn’t encrypted by default

This argument I have never found convincing. For all its faults Telegram is open source. Nothing made by Meta is. When they say “it’s encypted and we promise there’s no backdoor”, we are taking their word for it. I am not a cynical person but I can think of a thousand companies more trustworthy than Meta.

Uncanny. All of that is really close to my experience (I like to think I’m not bitter and miserable but I suspect you’re not either - just introverted or on the spectrum).

If I’m not important enough to my friends and family for them to install a easy to set up app, then I guess I never was that important to them.

This is the standard argument and it’s powerful. Problem is, it can easily be turned around: “if I’m not important enough for them to install this completely ubiquitous app that everybody is already using, then obviously they don’t care much about me”. Conundrum! The only way to “win” here is by playing the ethics card. But alas that argument is just not well understood by most people.

As I already mentioned, I already do not use Whatsapp. That is a massive sacrifice where I am. You may not be aware of this (I’m guessing American), but in western Europe almost everybody is now using Whatsapp for pretty much everything. Businesses are replacing the phone and email with it. The situation is even worse in Latin America.

If you meet a new social contact and you don’t have Whatsapp, that’s likely it, you will not be keeping in contact with that person. Typically they have Telegram installed but hardly use it (so the app gets killed and they won’t be notified of your message). As for Signal and the rest, most people haven’t even heard of them. I speak from experience. It’s a disaster and I worry the people who populate this forum (i.e. Americans who still use SMS) are not familiar with how dire the situation now is elsewhere in the world.

Seems a good summary even if I didn’t watch the vid. We’ve heard these talking points a million times by now.

But I’d say the problem is not that so much that it’s paranoid as that it’s unrealistic. A messenger is not a weather app. You can’t just “change” it, you first need to ask everybody else in the world to change theirs too. Which obviously isn’t gonna happen.

Just my Whatsapp abstinence alone is costing me dearly socially. Without Telegram it would be straight to the hermitage. Very few normies use even Signal, let alone all the weird and wonderful “even more private” alternatives whose names I never bother to try to remember.

This advice is completely disconnected from the reality of anyone who has, or wants to have, a social life.

Predictably insightful.

multiple groups that prioritize different paired corners of this people-information-scale triangle

Fact remains that we’re struggling mainly with the scale corner here.

Great write-up! This is YSK premium content.

Thanks for providing links to the key information (rather than just vibesy bait for inane upvoting/downvoting).

The danger of ignoring it is that it happens anyway in a worse form than it might otherwise take. It’s the eternal pragmatism-vs-idealism situation. Taking the approach of no compromises is risky.

Amazing. Never thought of this explanation but it makes sense.

An unusually clear explanatory article. This problem needs fixing. As a layperson it looks to me like the “discussion” mentioned needs to crystallize into a proper meeting of all stakeholders so as to get a binding decision about how to fix it.

Fair points. My other arguments stand.

First, why jump straight to insulting accusations of bad faith? Why not just be civil and respond politely to the argument made? i.e. as you did in the 3rd sentence of your post.

The web, by definition, is open source (PS: notwithstanding Wasm and unreadable minification). That is not the case of the vast majority of mobile apps. We have few means of checking what they’re up to besides traffic analysis and trusting their creators. Apps can use lower-level device APIs than web apps and they frequently demand access to them without justification. Apps are distributed by app stores, which are under the thumb of the corporate mobile OSs. They are currently turning the screws using threats of device attestation, putting the future of the open app store F-Droid in doubt.

There are reasons that tech giants and developers alike are constantly pushing us to use apps and not the web. Disappointed (not to mention surprised) to see that some members of this forum seem to be with them.

Well done for being honest and don’t be discouraged by the (predictable) hate and scorn you’re getting for your efforts. Ahh, social media! If you had said all this in person to them, these same people would be pushing back with civility and human decency, but with the barrier of a screen they feel empowered to shout and mock. We still haven’t learned.

What the hell is this completely random news article doing here? Seriously. Moderation needed.

OK I get all that and it’s not to be dismissed. But their product is better than what we have here. That’s why Blacksky built upon it and not upon this, despite the cost. The excessive centralization seems to be more of a human problem than a technical one. Humans take the path of least resistance and Bluesky’s resources have allowed it to make a product that the fediverse will never be able to compete with.

Personally, I get what I want here (I don’t use Bluesky) but it’s pretty clear to me that I’m not representative (in caring about the principle of decentralization) and neither are you. I’m a pragmatist by nature. Bluesky and AT Proto are an obvious improvement on Twitter. If they have the potential to be a version of decentralization that actually takes off and goes mainstream (because let’s be serious, the fediverse is not doing that), then personally I would take that win. It hasn’t happened yet but personally I’m not going to spit on it in advance like everyone here is doing.

they are in complete control of the real-world use of it

They’re not. I mentioned Blacksky.

As I understand it, their endgame is that Bluesky will be a big fish in a pond of other fish, and that the best way to get that fishpond is to make Bluesky as good a product as possible, hence the (limited) VC money.

As a strategy it has risks but so does the alternative. To make the obvious comparison, UX on the fediverse is rubbish, with an incomprehensible onboarding funnel, amateurish design, servers that keep disappearing. There’s a reason Bluesky has eaten the fediverse’s lunch.

With respect, I think people here are making this into a sterile religious war when really it’s a disagreement about strategy. Some of the people who vouch for Bluesky I have been following for years. They want exactly the same things as most people here. Personally, I see no reason to question their intentions.