this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
659 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

71667 readers
4727 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
659
Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
76 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The chat space is problematic.

  • There are a lot of apps that don’t encrypt at all (e.g. Google chat, discord, etc)
  • There are apps that encrypt but they are subject to jurisdictions that can or may in the future force backdoors (e.g., Chinese apps, possibly telegram, possibly US apps in the future)
  • There are apps that encrypt, are in countries that are privacy focused but are not for free (e.g., threema)

This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have

Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Ain’t that the truth

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I mean honestly, feature wise, it's pretty good in my opinion. It has some very useful features Signal lacks (e.g. live location sharing) and it's not slow or badly designed in my opinion.

I still prefer Signal since I don't like Facebook, but realistically speaking WhatsApp is pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

WhatsApp

Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it's so prevalent elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

IIRC it's because US cell carriers don't charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.