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Comment by Denvercoder9 | Hacker News Reader

You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the primary communication method for large parts of the globe. The world might be better off if we transitioned off them, but having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely won't make the world better off.

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> You should consider that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the primary communication method for large parts of the globe.

I wish regulators would have though that before allowing the purchase of WhatsApp by Facebook. That both of the main messaging apps are down at the same time is worrisome.

sms

You do know why a lot of people moved away from SMS? hint: https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/141867-price-gouging-it-c...

That article is from 2012. Admittedly a lot of people moved off for the pricing reasons but essentially everyone I communicate with in the US uses SMS/iMessage today.

Well, the world is a bit bigger than the US. Everywhere, apart from the US and a few other (East Asian?) countries, WhatsApp usage is widespread.

That seems to be a US-specific oddity. My German mobile plan still charges per SMS (a few cents per message), and apart from verification codes or delivery notices, I never receive any SMS at all. No one uses them for personal communication over here, to the point where people don't know how to send them and I wouldn't know of another country apart from the US where SMS are still widely used.

I'm French and SMS are ubiquitous here; sometimes even more so than email. All operators offer unlimited free SMS, even the cheapest 2€/month subscriptions. I'm not sure I personally know anyone who uses WhatsApp.

SMS used to be priced like you describe until a new operator (aptly named "Free") entered the market in 2012 with free SMS plans and forced the other three operators to align.

Whatsapp is (and especially was) way better at sending photos than whatever SMS app installed on one's phone. It also used to work with crappier phones, for which there was no easy way (that I know of) of installing a SMS app that would send photos. Plus, you have Whatsapp private groups, which I don't know if you can emulate using SMS.

Almost all plans offer free sms in the Netherlands.

Which sucks because SMS is an increasing attack vector in current times and iMessage had a fun pile of zero days this year.

Also US based here luckily everyone I talk to is spread across signal/telegram/discord/googlechat for the most part.

I use Gchat at work as essentially an adjunct to Gmail. I don't even have any of the other apps installed. I do use Facebook Messenger for one good friend who lives in Europe.

But, in general TBH, I don't use texting all that much day to day.

Brilliant, why hadn't I thought of this?

haha, well at least we didn't fail back on nothing.

Maybe now’s not the best time. https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xpm8/company-that-routes-b...

An abrupt, unplanned outage will probably do more to hasten a transition away from these services than any slow, planned transition would.

Only true if this outage is extended.

Let's hope for the worst.

One can dream!

More likely it’ll be fixed by tomorrow and everyone will forget about it by next week.

Rare problems aren’t enough to disrupt entrenched systems. It will take users suffering some recurring pain to motivate them to move to another network.

With all of the zeal only a young adult can muster, I hated the first people to tell me that they knew about problems and waited for them to break before doing anything.

I get no credit for fixing things before they break, and sometimes it's shown up negatively on an annual review. If you have to cajole people to help you start to look pushy, or worst case like a bully. I've heard back from two former employers that the moment I left some manager tried to roll back things I did and be surprised when it turned out that the developers wanted to keep things the way they were.

You can see the lights go on for people in the trenches when some bit of software or step saves them from turning a 2 alarm fire into a 5 alarm fire, but the managers don't notice that non-verbal communication, and maybe half the time does someone editorialize the experience for all of the non-technical people (If I do it, it sounds like "I told you so" so I usually don't).

We can both recognize that this effects a lot of people and recognize that it could be a good thing for the long run. WA has a lock-in effect that is difficult for competitors to fight against. An outage like this can help bring competition simply because people may no longer be so reliant upon a single app. Simply having a second app for "backup" helps reduce the lock-in. This should always be the response to "I don't want to install a billion apps"

Google searches for "Telegram" are exploding today:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=te...

I added "Signal", "Matrix", and "Session" to compare competitors. Looks like only Telegram and Signal are benefiting.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...

Your link is for Netherlands only.

Worldwide it looks like Telegram is benefitting. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=te...

Thanks! I just edited the parent's link and didn't notice.

But isn't telegram less secure than Whatsapp (at least in terms of the lack of e2e for the former)? Or am I missing something?

Do you mean the e2e that WhatsApp claims is in their client but since it's closed source no one can check? /s

>But isn't telegram less secure than Whatsapp

lol, how can you be on HN and be this not informed

Yes, going from WhatsApp to Telegram is a sidegrade at best. Probably a downgrade for most people, since Telegram is unencrypted by default.

Telegram has the great advantage that you can have it working on multiple devices at the same time. Whatsapp's web and desktop solutions are terrible.

On the other hand, voice calls on Whatsapp are far better.

I thought Telegram offered e2e encryption.

It's optional and disabled by default for 1-on-1 chats and not available at all for group chats.

> having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely won't make the world better off.

It may indirectly, in that it may spur a transition to another platform. Most likely, that platform will also be a privacy-invading centralized service, but in an ideal world it would be something like XMPP, Matrix, etc.

People would be using telegram or signal for business in less than one day.

Nobody would ever think about WhatsApp in one month. People that uses Facebook as their photo album would be pissed with losing some old photos taken with digital point and shoot cameras.

Stalkers of former boyfriends and girlfriends would be inconsolable for a few weeks but then move on and be better with it.

There would be a great cultural loss in the disappearance of some groups and even some profiles of very interesting people. But they would resurface, in blogs, telegram channels, forums and whatever else appeared to fill the vacuum. Nobody misses myspace. Nobody would miss Facebook. And eventually Facebook will disappear.

The Internet is the primary communication for large parts of the globe. If we let Facebook use this excuse that they are the Internet (which is sadly very true for poorer parts of the world where a smartphone is the only computer accessible), they must be regulated like a telecom provider.

People can surprisingly adapt though, especially if it's a matter of survival.

I've slummed it learning a new OS or using a new keyboard, within a couple of weeks you forget you had to change anything.

At the very least there are choices in many circumstances.

Tox is working fine and I've never seen it go down, presumably because it is distributed.

The outage is very good in that is will remind people to have backup way of communication for people that matter to them.

Personally I have a least one other messaging app + email address of people I contact regularly. At worst I could send a paper mail.

But it does. People need to learn to have fallbacks and backups, and the vast majority of them is only willing to learn this the hard way - see backups vs. losing something important.

As if people wouldn't switch to something different and equivalent within 24 hours if FB's version ceased to exist.

It's not that easy. Installing another messenger is easy, but you need to migrate your contacts to it as well. If you've been communicating through Facebook Messenger and don't have their phone number, you're shit out of luck. With WhatsApp you're somewhat better off since it uses phone numbers as user identifiers, so you at least have everyone's number, but international texting is incredibly unreliable and international calling is prohibitively expensive for lots of people.

Those are niche scenarios. For most people their contacts are on their phones and cloud accounts.

while reading this comment the deus ex dark age ending music started playing in my head

"the facebook's going black... no more political battles with elderly relatives, transmissions of any kind... we'll start again, live in villages"

(then cutting to zuck plugged into the planetsized AI... exploding)

I'm still waiting for a covid vaccine named Ambrosia

If only my pocket WhatsApp device had other ways to contact people, now I'll have to go get a new device.

Seriously as transitions go, leaving WhatsApp and Messanger will be the smoothest most painless transition there ever was.

In some parts of the world feature phones and some smartphones are pocket WhatsApp devices. Free data if you're using FB and WhatsApp, with phone calls and SMS also covered (but that doesn't help much with international communication, international SMS is even more unreliable than domestic SMS). It's not that they'll need a new device, they'll need a new service plan that costs more money.

My country had something like this when Facebook Zero was around but the telcos regulator ordered it off as it was a violation to net neutrality. And iirc, the same happened in India and other places where this was implemented.

Facebook Free Basics was quickly blocked in India https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-regulator-netneutra...

whatsapp uses phone numbers, so if you can do whatsapp can't you just do sms?

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