The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Here’s what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it.
I’ll never understand the hold whatsapp has on people
The network effect: If everyone you ever message is there and stays there, it’s hard to leave…
Yeah, it’s pretty clear from a sociological perspective: what’s the point of a messaging app you cannot use to message anyone?
I swear sometimes Lemmy people need to go out a bit more often.
I think it’s more that Lemmy folks assume a lot of universal context from what they know. So maybe get out more and need to interact with humans, but also experience more of the world.
Some American that only uses iMessage will have no idea what entire continents of people use Whatsapp more than anything else, including to just make calls.
I’ll never understand the hold any of these apps have on people.
It’s not even whatsapp specifically. I used to live in a place that only did Viber. Which is just Whatsapp with ads, themed purple. Everyone was on it, and people on whatsapp were maybe 50/50 at best. But without Viber, you didn’t exist and couldn’t message anyone and expect a response.
It’s physchology I think.
People who feel they need to have regular communal celebration of their every thought and act really struggle to consider losing a few contacts who refuse to move to better alternatives. People who are happy to recieve the same ego strokes through fewer closer peers are ok with the move.
Same with leaving Facebook, Twitter, etc…
Personnaly use it for work too so it’s not even just a social thing
The only American software I run is FOSS. I’ve got no problems with FOSS devs of any country. American corporations are the swollen sore on your lip you keep biting. Get rid of them and the world’s your oyster.
I kinda feel like all dumb phones have to do is ship with an Signal client, the lack of WhatsApp was apparently the driving reason why the reporter went back and I think its more reasonable to expect friends to move to Signal than to SMS. (Its also really unsecure)
There are a couple of community made clients I wonder how hard it is to implement the signal protocol.Signal is American too though
True, but it’s not owned by privacy enemy and trump slave Zuckerberg, or a similar big tech bro
I mean tbh it feels like the EU is putting more pressure on private chats than America does, at least right now. I am not sure how things are in Asia. I think the bigger problem is their reliance on AWS if Bezos or some friend of his does not want Signal to be a thing they can probably just switch it off fairly easy.
It’s open. Just compile your own client. Though it’s be allowed on the Signal network. So you have speed up a server too. American and open isn’t a problem.
To be fair, I recently discovered RCS messages. Very cool. I’ve been using those quite a bit recently and with many people I do not need Whatsapp anymore.
I did try RCS with a couple of friends and its great.
The only problem I have with it is the same I have with WhatsApp is that I cannot make sure what is happening on the server side (or even on the client side for that matter if its closed source) and what they are doing with the meta data. It seems like they would still be able to map out with whom I talk to and when (even if the content is encrypted which is not the default with RCS i believe).
Messages are end to end encrypted, I believe it is by default.
Google definitely has some metadata if you use the android app, at the very least the list of your contacts.
Regarding who you talk to, maybe: messages do not necessarily go through the servers of Google, it depends whether your carrier has their own servers.
Either way, I do see this as a great advantage over Whatsapp: while this system is still mostly controlled by Google the underlying technology most definitely is designed for decentralization and I know quite a few carriers are beginning to support it.
You can’t use RCS without Google, though.
Can’t use WhatsApp without Meta. What’s your point?
The point is not relying on US tech. It’s in the title.
The person went back to the smartphone in order to use WhatsApp. I feel RCS is a better option as it doesn’t strictly need Google, the reason why it is google is that google has developed the only application which supports RCS.
I am confused as to why they went with a dumb phone. Why not go with a non american degoogled android phone? Or to even go a step further, get a sailfish OS powered phone.
