I keep hoping with this anti-American Big Tech push that Europe and other places are doing they’ll get off Meta products. But I’m also not holding my breath.
Comment on Why does most of the world use WhatsApp as their messaging app rather than RCS/SMS?
JeSuisUnHombre@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
SMS uses cellular, WhatsApp uses internet. Internet connects you anywhere with one flat rate, cellular may charge extra per message or for international communication.
Signal is better, but everyone’s grandmother is already on WhatsApp and good luck getting them to switch
TheMadCodger@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
qyron@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I work at a company that I strongly suspect had a very serious security breach because of Whatsapp.
During the outage, we were back to SMS and direct phone calling only. After the system was restored, back to how everything was before, caution be damned, lessons not learned.
It’s not bad enough to have that invasive application as the default means of passing information around (messages, photos, video and even audio, of all things!) on work phones, office personel has it paired to their computers, where highly sensitive programs and data is stored.
Pamasich@kbin.earth 2 weeks ago
I think that's why OP asked about RCS, which is also internet but built into SMS apps.
freddo@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Because the common user doesn’t know what rcs is, it is still sms on their minds.
mofongo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
RCS is very finicky where i live, it can disconnect and fall back to sms at any moment, even with data enabled.
Ugurcan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Signal always sounded too good to be true. I won’t be shocked to learn it’s an NSA front I promise.
Attacker94@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Their clients are open source, unless you are worried about the NSA being better at decryption than is currently thought possible, the only information you are giving is encrypted traffic, who you are, who you sent a message to, and if their press release are anything to go by, they are trying to muddy the waters of the identification part with moving away from phone # account creation. I’m also a proponent of xmpp for a similar reason, and I think that xmpp is the better protocol, but signal has more concessions to non techies
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Deltachat and Jabber/XMPP are good decentralized/federated alternatives to Signal.
forestbeasts@pawb.social 1 week ago
There’s also Matrix, but it kinda sucks. (We have both it and XMPP.) It handles encryption key management infinitely better than XMPP though.
(Haven’t used Deltachat.)
(If you’re selfhosting or trust your server, and the people you’re talking with are selfhosting or trust their server and you trust their server, you probably don’t need end to end encryption and XMPP without E2EE will work fine.)
– Frost
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Back at the turn of the century text messages were exorbitantly priced
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Which is crazy because it literally uses spare bandwidth they didn’t use (other than for the clock updates and other housekeeping) and the amount of data used is infinitesimal compared to voice or other data.
This is why it was free at first as it didn’t cost the carrier anything more. This changed quickly when they figured they could charge for it with rates as high as 20 cents per message in the US. This lead to crazy bills like $5,000.
www.wfmynews2.com/article/news/…/83-402630313
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS
njordomir@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I remember having only 200 SMS per month and having to ration them carefully because the plans were structured in a way where ordering more resulted in a big price jump.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I was at the tail end of pagers so being able to text was normal but using a cell phone to talk was nedt great thing. I was always confused why people wanted to go back to texting when they could just talk.
It wasn’t until I had a phone with a physical keyboard that I finally started texting to any degree. It never made sense during the Nokia era for me because it was slow and unintuitive.
nickiwest@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m in a country where this is apparently still the case. It seems that the major mobile carriers all charge for text messages to other networks.
WhatsApp is free regardless of your mobile provider. Most here even provide free access to WhatsApp that doesn’t count toward your data allotment.