this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
530 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
71495 readers
5174 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- 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.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don't, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it's hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
Already did that months ago when they change the term of services and people are aware of it at the time. Many install Signal, tried them, signal got overloaded, experience degraded, people are back to Whatsapp. Now only dead account are there. Telegram is more popular but that is just jumping from crocodile's mouth to shark's.
Government agencies, company customee services all relies on Whatsapp. They have emails but if you want to get response in timely manners, Whatsapp is the way to go (Or twitter, again another bad alternatives).
At least it is still E2E (supposedly), so it is not all bad. Look, I know I sound pessimistic because I am (at least in this specific topic). I hope everyone else can do better than me, cheers!
I did not experience this, and I've been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.
I'm familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it's a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.
WTF!? What country is that?
India
I'd hazard a guess that it's Brazil.
Be the change
It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you're not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.
This might be good middle ground. The last time I tried beeper, the apps is kinda .... suck tho. Well, at least it not full of ads!
Does it still require user to install their desktop app first?
Not that I'm aware of, never even knew it was ever a requirement. I've only used the android client and the browser client. For whatever reason they don't really communicate the browser is out there for use. It's chat.beeper.com for anyone looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Ux8DFgMSM
Might give you some ideas on how to do that
The most important people in my life is my family, especially my parents. Teaching them to try new app to chat to me is easy enough but all of their friends and groups are still on whatsapp.
Making them juggle between two apps (separating how they interact to me and totheir friends) is not easy. Justifying it is even harder, they simply don't care (to understand) the implication.
Rather than make them confused and worried about not being able to contact me, I just have to accept the status quo. It is the conclusion I arrive at.
Must be nice tho to not use any Meta product. :)