It's interesting how different the experience is inside the US vs the rest of the world. In Europe, where Android holds a majority, basically everyone is using 3rd party chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc...
I would agree, IF Signal also wouldn't allow backups on Android and wouldn't store images on desktop completely unencrypted... At this point it's just hypocrisy
IMO it's a user's choice whether or not to backup their data. Wire handled this quite well where you could backup your chat history etc but you were required to set an encryption password for the backup.
For reference, Signal is my main chat platform and my main point of contact. Having 2GB of chat histories that could just be lost at any moment is quite unnerving and a major reason for me to look at other platforms...
Compared to old.reddit + RES there's still some space for improvement in terms of UX for lemmy but overall, not too bad :P
Yeah, I generally prefer kbin's UI over lemmy's but given the backend is in PHP I have concerns that it might not be able to scale effectively with its growth.
Not saying that PHP is a complete showstopper but there are valid concerns in terms of maintainability...
You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.
Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.
Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative...
Oh yeah true forgot about that part. Pricing for phone and text plans within a country weren't the issue but across country was (and still is) is super costly and in Europe especially close to borders it's quite common to have friends and family that lives in another country, so having a cheap/free way to message them is also what gave rise to 3rd party messaging apps ^^