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!
The inconvenience of switching and learning a new thing is the largest deterrent. People complain but don’t care enough due to those reasons to switch.
I only text people on Signal, except the old grandparents or potential new friends that I will in time get to switch to Signal.
The inconvenience of switching and learning a new thing is the largest deterrent.
Honestly, oftentimes it’s not evem that, it’s the perception of learning being difficult.
I have some friends decided to pay hundreds of dollars to hire a plumber for something pretty simple to fix. As in, it’d take $50 and an hour once you factor in learning and practice runs. And they’re always complaining about not having money, yet they got mad when I told them how easy it was
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.
You can do the exact same thing with any of hundreds of different messaging apps. The only advantage is that they’re using the same messaging app, because it comes installed by default, you can’t remove it, and they don’t allow you to replace SMS with anything else. If you use an Android phone, it most likely comes with Google Messages pre-installed, which does the exact same thing.
In other words, it’s nothing to do with “user experience” and everything to do with being in a particular ecosystem.
On Android, I prefer QKSMS, actually.
I use Arch BTW
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.
You just said what they said but the opposite. Both are wrong. Being in the same ecosystem is not UX. It’s not something that anyone can design around.
So you don’t consider it an impact on the experience of using a product when it either does or doesn’t function on your device? Sounds like a most basic concept of UX to me, but I dunno what you mean, maybe.
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.
It’s not the bubble color. It’s what the bubble color signifies. ie: no rich communication services, no high quality video or audio calls, no stickers, no videos, low quality images, etc.
It’s not just that. I find SMS to be slower in terms of call and response vs iMessage. It’s like my android friends take longer to reply.
Very possible this is just latency intentionally introduced by Apple to make the experience worse. They’ve been known to do things like that.
They also intentionally degrade the quality of video feeds from non-Apple users, and intentionally degrade the quality of received MMS images.
Well pre-RCS they routed android users differently because they were not compatible. Google did something similar, but in reverse, adding back things like reactions, etc. to make android users not feel like they were getting a 2nd rate experience.
Discord is a hard one because it has some uniqueness to it.
It has bots, text channels, voice channels, and hundreds of thousands of people can join it if you need to.
A lot of my college clubs use it and there are a few thousand students in our biggest ones
It’s not unique, it’s just XMPP + Mumble.
I used to play with a large community and every time a new game would come out we’d always setup forum software, an XMPP (chat software) server and a Mumble server for that game. This was pretty easy to get done because we were all working in tech, but if you were an average gamer it wasn’t something that you could handle.
Discord packaged the text, voice and forum software into one application and they handle the server hosting. It only costs all of your privacy and $10/mo.
Maybe I’ll give this a shot when I have some free time.
You say it’s not unique and then list the ways it’s unique by packaging up multiple different services into 1.
Totally agree it’s a privacy nightmare but you discredit the service too much. There’s a reason it’s widely adopted the way it is, and it’s not because it’s the same as everything else.
It isn’t unique, it provides text, voice and video chatting. These are not new services to the world of technology.
What makes Discord stand apart is that they require that your chats, calls and streams are not private and, in exchange for people giving up their private data the users only have to install one piece of software instead of two. It is like a company giving people a ‘free’ phone as long as they or their advertisers can listen into the calls, read the texts and look at the videos on the phone.
The only thing that Discord does is to package the software in such a way that you can’t access it until you give them information about you and then they gate features behind you identifying yourself with a credit card and a phone number.
Network effect and the path of least resistance.
People usually resist change until there’s a net and obvious gain, or when thing don’t work as expected anymore.
And you need to consider that what’s important in a messaging platform for someone, might be vastly different for another.
I can’t control my contacts. I can control what I do. I was personally getting annoyed enough with Discord that I uninstalled the thing and stopped visiting it on the web. My account still exists AFAIK. I didn’t make a big production of it nor tell anyone; I simply left.
It was a bit of a sacrifice because I don’t connect with an extremely rewarding community on there as much anymore. Thankfully they still host IRL meetups and I do go to those.
I’m opinionated about messaging apps but I don’t try to convince anyone. Well, other than siblings and SOs. People who want to talk to me can find me on the apps I do hang out in. If they ask why I’m not on the big ones I will gladly tell them. But where they end up is their decision, not mine.
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.
It’s Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for me. I ditched the Facebook app a long time ago, but Messenger and Whatsapp remain on my device because no one wants to leave them. I try to keep my chats there as superficial as possible.
Also, this is my first comment ever on Lemmy, so hi everyone!
All your chat history has been published to the fediverse now. Welcome to Lemmy.
Welcome. A reminder for in case you don’t know, if it starts to feel stale, then it’s probably because of your viewing settings. If you switch it from Active (ironically, the least active), to Hot, 6 hours, Scaled, etc. after you’ve gone through all of the new to you posts, you’ll see a lot more action.
Thanks for the tip!
Welcome to lemmy!
No one wants to leave because nobody is leaving.
You’re still on WhatsApp and Messenger, they can still contact you that way, so why would they bother changing?
Pick a date, a week, a month, whatever, from now. Tell those you message regularly that you will be deleting all Meta apps on that date. Make it clear that that includes WhatsApp and Messenger. Explain why. I just linked some articles instead of having a long explanation but it still made it clear why.
Let them know they can contact you via Signal/SMS/email whatever you use after that date.
If the informed don’t take the leap, the ignorant never will.
Yeah well imagine what it is when you are old yourself… having a majority of like aged friends and even older family… no one is ever leaving FB before they are ded :-/
I less have an issue with people getting trapped in software they understand is insecure, and more with people who will push shit like telegram and pretend its the most private and secure thing ever invented. If they want to use discord, sure, fine with me. As long as they know not to do their activist work on discord I’m fine with it. People doing activist work/planning over telegram will never make me not cringe.
Signal isn’t something I personally want to use, but its tolerable, and it was doing a good job of replacing telegram in activist spaces I felt, but I’ve recently seen a few different groups using telegram again because they don’t trust signal.
xmpp with omemo is what I wish I could get people to use but uh, well, that just will never happen.
How do you set up XMPP with OMEMO as anonymously as possible? My friend and I would love to video call each other, currently we’re using SimpleX for this, but it’s very buggy. We use Molly for calling and SimpleX for texting, both of us are switching to using Libreboot laptops with QubesOS to communicate :)
I love teaching my friend privacy. He’s really gotten into it, I’ve done a good job making him just as paranoid as I am!
I’m gonna be honest, its been so long since I’ve actually had people to set it up and use it with that even I would need to spend a day and a half figuring out how to set it up again.
Understanding why those platforms are bad is another layer of thought that most people aren’t capable or willing to engage in.
Probably the idea of “all my other friends are on the mainstream platform so why would i move to another platform specifically for you?”
I had my wife and best friend using signal until they dropped support for sms. Switching between apps was too much for us.
Switching between apps was too much for us.
I’ve heard this from a few people, but I have trouble understanding it. Perhaps its because I’ve never had the experience of being able to send text messages to all of my contacts in one place, but the effort required seems pretty insignificant to me.
different people act differently but that move by signal deff had a cooling effect on signal adoption. as if on purpose.
It was definitely on purpose, because privacy is more important to Signal than line-go-up adoption number statistics.
SMS is dangerous and insecure and everyone should stop using it immediately.
Sure…
Chasing the hot new app that was created by some one-person dev team for “privacy” reasons is a little like chasing amy. You are looking for an ideal app that doesn’t exist, so you can’t really suggest a better alternative. Instead you are just nagging people for using discord or imessage even though those apps are perfectly fine for 99% of people. Even privacy focused people. imessaage specifically is great for privacy and unless you have strong evidence of an apple installed backdoor for the p2p imessage encryption I’d question why your are against it.
The downvotes around anything suggesting iMessages is always ridiculous to me.
It really is the safest app I know for messaging. Is there some privacy issue of which I’m unaware?
The answer is very simple: iMessage fails to include a libre software license text file, which is the standard that ensures we can maintain control over the software we use. Without this, we’re banned from forking the app, meaning we’re unable to ensure it stays aligned with our privacy values. We need the freedom to fork the software to ensure it meets our needs, not just rely on buzzwords like encryption or P2P.
Without the ability to fork the code, we’re trapped in every decision of its owner. Non-libre software bans us from maintaining the control needed to ensure it meets our privacy standards.
I am no tech pioneer so a lot of these phrases mean nothing to me. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn, however.
I’m curious, which specific messaging app allows any of what you’ve listed?
Which phrases?
While in the ideal world a non-opensource app would be a deal breaker, in the current world, there is no indication that imessage has any privacy concerns associated with it. It’s not just taking Apple at their word, there have been a lot practical analysis of how the protocol works. Plus the underlying cryptography is sound.
https://security.apple.com/assets/files/Security_analysis_of_the_iMessage_PQ3_protocol_Stebila.pdf <- hosted by Apple.
https://www.douglas.stebila.ca/blog/archives/2024/02/21/imessage-pq3/ <-original author
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity25/sec25cycle1-prepub-595-linker.pdf <- Independent analysis of the protocol and implementation.Sure you could claim that actually Apple is lying about how they are securing imessage, but that is a lot of effort when they could just take the Facebook approach and straight up admit that they have the ability to read your texts, much easier, and safer legally.
I never once wrote ‘open source’. I was never writing about that.
Moreover, any operating system has complete control over its apps. iMessage requires iOS or similar. iOS fails to include a libre software license text file.
The dangers of this are explained above.
I’m using “open source” colloquially. The point is that your specific nitpick about imessage not having some specific text file and license associated with it, isn’t important in a world where there doesn’t exist an alternative that is nearly as robust and supported. Ultimately you are upset that imessage is run by a corporation (a valid complaint) but there is no indication that the corporation is lying to you about the privacy of their messaging service.
You have completely mischaracterised what I wrote.
Because it’s unavailable to the vast majority of people?
So because some people can’t use no one should use it? I don’t understand the complaint. Is the hot new 1-man privacy focused app that requires side-loading more accessible?
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 since if something happens we can just move, I am concerned about the security implications.
Networking effect
People use whatever is most popular even if its the shittest thing such as Facebook.
Only time people will care is when it personally and tangibly affects them.
For Facebook/whatsapp watomatic can be used to remind people you are leaving or such.
I remember when Snapchat was extremely popular for messaging. One of the worst apps I’ve ever used. Just an absolutely atrocious UI.
