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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

And people keep using it, because it's convenient. Every single time I try to set something up for my friends - including a dedicated domain, with dedicated XMPP server that I'm willing to run, maintain, and trim to their needs, completely free, because running a community shouldn't be a business - I find myself on the bad end of "yeah, but Facebook Messenger is enough". Sometimes it's WhatsApp.

The only thing they'd need to do is fill in a username and a password field, and use any client, web, app, desktop, anything, but no, because Facebook is there, it's pre-installed on phones.

What happened to the idea of belonging to a group, to something? To express identity online? How do I move people?

I'd be willing to run mail and XMPP on their domains, because some of them still has a website, but it doesn't seem to interest anyone.

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Seems to me that the main problem you're running into is the network effect Messenger/WhatsApp/etc have.

Sure, there's some wonderful chat clients out there, but the average person wonders why they need any more when 99% of their friends, family members, frenemies, estranged highschool classmates and so on are already easily reachable on Messenger.

Even the most wonderfully accessible and user friendly app is still another app that I need to take the time to understand. It's another app for which I need to endure the endless parade of 2.0 rewrites and UI overhauls. It's another app I need to figure out where I want to place on my home screen.

Hence the question of what happened to the idea, the need, to belong to groups.

Why is a network, where everyone is present, everyone's profile looks the same, everyone is just a gear in the machine, is appealing?

Had we gotten this lazy, that we'll only go for the most comfortable, despite the lack of any option self-expression, the nonexistent privacy, and the complete lack of respect towards users?

It's very much possible that I'm wrong, and that generic audience doesn't need or doesn't want any customization, that the convenience overrides everything, but in this case, anything "revealing" Facebook is completely futile, isn't it?

WhatsApp and FB are the tools. The infrastructure. Within these tools are the individual groups, where every group has its own identity, self-expression, and privacy.

You may ask why I say privacy, when recent events have proved that an illusion.

I would argue that it's not privacy from the government, or some big unnamed corporate that people are looking for - It's privacy from their other networks. Almost nobody I've talked to cares if someone not directly related to their life has access to their data. Now, I believe they should have this privacy whether they care or not, but that's a separate discussion to "what are people's needs and desires?".

So I suggest that WhatsApp/FB do in fact provide all the needs of the users.

I love Facebook's functionality. I'd just like them to stop doing shady shit with my data, and I suspect all the current pressure on them will achieve that.

You like Facebook because they host and develop features they get from developers who are paid with they money they get from advertisers who pay for access to your data.

Really? I'd suspect not. Call me a skeptic, but I suspect we'll get some token admissions/actions until the heat's off, then they'll be back to their old ways. The attitude to data is thoroughly baked into the whole company.

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