- I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.
Why don't they just come out and say "because, profit!" or some good ol' fashioned BS about "value-creation" or some other American thing like that ...)
I get it though, no one wants to pay for 100s of little free marginally useful things we use every day, but if you look back at what whatsapp did in the beginning, the £3 a year they were asking is so worth it
In order to truly solve this problem there has to be some kind of federation and cross-platform standards so that alternatives are able to rise up and compete with big tech.
I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well).
When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using Telegram or various others that I strongly prefer, and now that they've captured entire societies and communities with their free app, they're going to make ME pay?
My feeling is that capitalism is just not a good model for messaging apps with network effects. Regulation is sorely needed, at the very least for interoperability (like the phone network), and maybe more.
Corporate advocates love to whine about cost yet seem to be blind to the context of the situation.
Meta captures enough of the entire global spend on ad revenue to be considered the biggest player in ads, yet we should spare sympathy for the poor servers of whatsapp - famously optimised to scale to 1B users with 50 engineers - which are now compelled to resort to inserting ads in order to cover the costs to run operations and keep the lights on.
These users just don't want to pay for anything, shame on them for using free services subsidised by massive corporations that undercut the market with the explicit aim of expanding the audience and clawing it back later. It's not Meta / Whatsapp's fault that they're exploiting this situation they've shrewdly developed over years, it's the individual moral failing of each user of the service.
Meanwhile ragebait / propaganda / angry racist uncle news is free on Facebook and shared in various forms, and meaningful news + journalism is locked behind various paywalls and other costs. Why won't these people just pay???
That way a user in Europe could "subsidize" 4-10 users in the developing world. Maybe that's a little to social democratic for a corporation.
If you talk about that stuff, people will dilly-dally with the usual "well I already have too many apps, I'm not sure I want to install one more"
I tell people that the video calls are better (which was true in my experience, back when I still used WA). Instant install
Which is probably true. Not magically because they’re women, but because they’re different from the status quo. Having people of different genders, races, backgrounds, life experiences in positions of power increases the pool of knowledge and understanding of the world and allows solutions to problems which the other groups are blind to. Diversity is the goal, not just specifically women.
> They are supposedly the better humans, and would never engage in manipulative tactics...
That is an argument no one is making. You’re attacking a straw man. Of course women can be bad leaders too. Anyone can.
> So whatever she is doing, it must be good and in good faith.
As opposed to your argument, I’d say. Using one single specific example from one single specific person on one single specific case to “counter” a general thought that doesn’t even correspond to what you claimed is disingenuous.
Anyone new who wants to message me, I simply say "I'm on Signal" and if it's important enough, they go and install it; it's been fairly frictionless, after all how hard is it to download an app and go through the fairly minimal registration process; and for someone already using WhatsApp, "one more account" probably isn't a major concern.
I tried various steps in the past to retain access to WhatsApp for a couple of people who didn't move, by having a work account on my phone, with a second SIM, but a one-click mistake one time gave WhatsApp my entire contact list from the "Personal" sandbox account, and I've decided not to even bother again.
With some people it worked though and we are using Signal for some time now. Maybe it is too much to expect a 100% success rate for switching.
And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.
In all fairness, no one uses SMS, and no one uses iMessage (outside of the US maybe?).
WhatsApp is omnipresent in Singapore. For example, every business, every support channel, every delivery company uses WhatsApp. WhatsApp QR codes are everywhere (similar to QQ/wechat in CN).
Most iPhone users I know in Singapore never even set up their iMessage (which is also only available on iOS and is a total pain to get to work if you're dabbling in various sim cards, as is very common in SEA). So yes, there's a very good reason WhatsApp is very popular in some parts of the world (similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) until quite recently in Indonesia). It's become too big to fail and took over a very very big portion of (private/business) communication in many parts of the world. And it 100% needs more regulation.
"Meta’s ad business is “in as strong a position now as it’s ever been,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst and founder of the consulting firm Madison and Wall. The company’s share of the global digital ad business is around 15 percent, he said. Last year, almost all of Meta’s $164 billion in revenue came from advertising."
TL;dr: Advertising business injects more advertising.
> And I don't want to go to signal because it's only marginally better. It's still American and still a walled garden (no third party apps allowed, no federation). It's a slightly less smelly walled garden.
This, to me, is downright irrational. "Less smelly" is better, especially if it takes zero effort (you don't even need to create an account with a password, it just sends you an SMS).
If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.
Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.
Over time such verification "decays". People buy a new phone, that sort of thing, but it was a healthy boost in one inexplicable moment.
Genuinely curious. I am in WhatsApp groups for my kids soccer teams (who will be there at the game, can my kid drive together with you to the match), my kids school classes (Johnny lost his headphones did anyone see them), my work teams "social chat" (happy birthday, I am at conference XYZ) etc. etc. In your situation, which of the three scenarios applies?
1 - You are not in such groups
2 - You were in such groups, and the entire group moved over to Signal
3 - You were in such groups, but the entire group did not move over to Signal and now you are not in these groups anymore
Be better, come on.
6 methods to just keep up with work. I also have at least three ways to reach required documents and meeting notes. I really don't want to jump like a platformer character from point to point to be able to communicate and get things done.
In my personal life, I prefer "1 task, 1 application" model. Communications, one application. Personal information storage? Everything in one place, etc.
Application hopping has a very big mental overhead, and kills my flow. Many colleagues are in the same boat.
It's not Signal, it's any app, account, for any reason.
No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.
The moment they start placing calls to action and distraction in that view is the moment people will move - telegram is a drop in replacement with more features, I won’t argue it’s the ideal choice but at least it keeps meta on their toes as a potential competitor.
EDIT: re: Work, my colleagues are all on Signal, we have lots of Signal groups to communicate.
A European alternative would be excellent (I'm in the UK), but no such thing exists, that said, Signal's server and clients are open-source and can be self-hosted, or even deployed at scale by a European government/entity if they so wish.
I work in the "secure comms" space, and I have reviewed every line of code in the open-source server (as of the revision I last worked on), and built products on it, and though I can't prove they run the same code they publish, I'm "happy enough" with what I see that I'd use it over anything owned by Meta any day.
In an ideal world, I'd host it myself for everyone I communicate with to use, but without federation that's not a possibility, so given a choice between Signal and WhatsApp, the decision is hands-down Signal.
It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time.
Why?
1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it)
2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free.
3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013
Expect this to scale, in my experience you can move your family over to another service. Groups of families your kid is somehow in contact with, not so much...
I keep 'lean' devices, the apps that I actually use, battery lasts from days to weeks (phone, tablet respectively) and NoRoot Firewall (on Android) makes sure that my phone stays 'silent' to the apps and target IP-addresses of my choosing.
I also distinctly remember that I didn't pay by the deadline (although I planned to cave in later) but finally the threat didn't materialize and I didn't lose access (or maybe I did, but for a day or two). Some people did pay and didn't get any advantage over those of us who didn't.
This was in Spain, so maybe the issue is that the specifics vary per country. In particular, I think your point 1 wasn't really true here. WhatsApp monopolized messaging (including even elderly population) because it was free. You wouldn't convince most people here (and especially the elderly) to pay for an app, it would be dead on arrival. Perhaps the charge after the first year you mention was somewhere in the official small print, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure everyone was using it under the assumption that it was free. They only tried charging a fee that single time I'm mentioning, and they backtracked fast.
But it's exactly because I already have to deal with too many of them that I don't want to add more.
Also I don't like moxie's attitude but that's more of a personal concern that won't apply to most. Like not allowing third party clients or federation and shooting many suggestions down on github. It's his right to do that but it's also mine to not want to use it. For a "just a little bit better" experience I'm not moving to that.
I use matrix a lot and I think this is by far the best and most open option but most people don't know it. I bridge all the other apps through it now. Also, arathorn is a much nicer person who responds much better to criticism.
> If there was a non-American alternative to Signal, surely I would go for it. But there isn't. In the meantime, Signal is by far the best alternative to WhatsApp in terms of privacy.
But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one. Not even much better in any way than whatsapp.
> Not to mention that there is actually a valid reason to not allow third party apps (spoiler: security). Last time I heard a fork of Signal making the news, it was pretty bad.
I don't care so much about that (and I work in cybersec). What matters more to me is being in control of my data. Being able to export them wherever I want etc.
I had an issue recently with whatsapp where they locked my account because of "spam". I wasn't spamming but they probably thought my matrix bridge was suspicious. However because of that bridge I could still access my chat data. I couldn't in whatsapp itself. Signal could do the same to me. So I would only use it bridged to Matrix anyway, like I do whatsapp.
And in terms of security: I don't believe neither WhatsApp nor Signal is good enough to prevent a state actor from reading my messages. Even if they can't get in the app they can compromise an endpoint. And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages. So I don't see much difference there.
I do get that I'm probably in one of the few areas outside the US where iMessage is pretty big, but even then SMS (probably RCS now) is how you communicate with Android users.
It also doesn't chance the fact that it make no sense for me to pay for e.g. WhatsApp, when I have the SMS available at no additional cost.
I am male. I can't "be better", I am already "the problem". Which is a reason why I am so fed up be the fight of the sexes. Its overboarding accusations on all sides. And I am not willing to "turn the other cheek" anymore.
> Nobody said women are perfect angels who can do no wrong
Ahem, the "believe all women" crowd did and do.
If that's the only choice, maybe yes. Though the installed base of whatsapp is so big I could not leave it right now anyway. So Signal would only be extra.
But for me to voluntarily promote an app it has to be a lot more open than Signal. Even if other people around me start using it I'll probably be the last to move.
This is wildly untrue on iOS. Perhaps people have 100+ apps. But the rest, not so much.
I finally had to install WhatsApp on a trip recently for group coordination, but ensured it didn't get things like contact access, and removed it afterwards.
Kids school may well be an outlier (US), but they send formal communication by email (with an SMS notification or call for emergencies), and the parent group is all on iMessage.
People on Signal tend to have much less volume of overall messages and groups. For someone on WhatsApp to forward you the invite is a hassle for them, sure, but it is an infinitesimal unnoticeable increment on how many in/out messages they deal with in a day.
As I mention in another thread, people will complain that they "have too many apps" if you pitch Signal as a privacy app. They would install it instantly if you told them the emojis are funnier or whatever. Because they already installed 300+ apps and one more is actually .3% increment ; whereas for your typical GrapheneOS F-droid person, adding whatsapp would be a +15% increase of apps on their homepage.
It's kind of the same with those WhatsApp groups. There will be 1,000 messages in the group this week/month. 3 of those are the actual invite you need, and if you have actual human connections with folks, someone will send you those.
We're one of only a few countries[1] who call the game Chinese Whispers.
It's like: should we all go to a vegan restaurant instead of the usual steakhouse because you decided you want to "try" being vegan this Friday night, of all nights. Just try it out another day and let us have our fun, Fred.
If you were not on WhatsApp at all, then it becomes a balance of : tiny per-person inconvenience versus 100% clear-cut decision on your part. Oh you've converted to whatever religion and can't have pork anymore? Now we have a choice between not inviting you at all, or trying the restaurant next door.
Because normal people just never close apps. Are they silently shut down/paused after a while?
And I fully expected to be contradicted by people telling me that they can't live without WhatApp because their contacts use it. I've never installed WhatsApp and my contacts can either contact me on any non-spyware app they choose, or by SMS. It actually works, telling people that you don't have WhatsApp.
> But I wouldn't be able to actually move. It would just be yet another one.
Just don't keep a backup WhatsApp account around, because then people will use it.
That would actually be marginally better. No everyone is on f-ing Snapchat. I'm in Denmark, which like the US is pretty big on iMessage, so originally we where using that. Then my sister got an Android phone, and the group chat obviously broken, because no RCS back then.
Everyone has SMS, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger and Instagram (except me for Meta products). So no one is really keen on adding a fifth app, where for me it would remove Snapchat, bringing me down to just SMS and Signal.
That's my household, my parents, my grandparents, my parents-in-law, my sibling(s), cousins, aunts/uncles, sibling(s)-in-law, friends, and my colleagues.
Some of my children's' friends' parents who I'm friendly enough with also began using Signal so we can communicate. Those who are school friends but not outside-of-school-friends, we can communicate with via the school's app.
Almost anyone I could want to communicate with is on Signal, all of the family is directly or indirectly because of me, and friends and colleagues has been a combination.
Anyone I don't know well enough to have a conversation about privacy and Meta being the antithesis of it, is not likely someone I need to communicate with.
All in, my wife, on WhatsApp, isn't really "keep[ing] me in the loop", unless we're messaging a trades-person or similar, but that's infrequent enough to not be an issue.
But I have a bunch of close (to hearth) and very far (geographically) friends who arent techies and who couldn't care less about ads or privacy related stuff. So, Whatsapp is unfortunately still needed.
So we should avoid doing this, "Telephone" is a perfectly good name for this idea, and it's not racist. There are lots of small changes we can make, which make the world slightly better for everybody.
Words can change meaning a lot in a lifetime. Not too long ago, someone here called me out for saying "transvestite", which was a surprise given one of my favourite comedians called themselves an "executive transvestite": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)
And my mum, when her Alzheimer's was already bad but not quite bad enough she couldn't live in her own home, referred to the cupboard as a "glory hole" — I'd never been aware of meaning #9 until she used it so, "(Scotland and Northern England) A deep built-in cupboard under the eaves or stairs of a house used for general storage, particularly of unrelated or unwanted items stored in some disorder": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glory_hole
Still, could be worse, as I found out when my grandmother used the word "Irish" in the derogatory sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish#Adjective
One thing that's nice about matrix is that you can select keywords to trigger notifications. Most of the other apps don't have that. So I tell people to say PRIO or PRORITY if their message is really important, so they can force a notification. Any other messages just get looked at when I get around to it and don't notify. If they abuse the priority I simply remove their right to do that.
But none of the other apps seems to be able to do these keywords or (even better) have an option to mark a message as urgent or something.
Like you seem to care about your messages not being entirely public ("And even a bad third-party app will be sufficient to prevent drive-by hackers with a pineapple from reading my messages") but at the same time you're fine with Telegram not being E2EE.
And then you seem to consider that a state actor being able to read the messages in transit is the same as them hacking into the phones?
And it all suggests that somehow the only reasonable threat model is "not caring about a state actor targetting oneself specifically and not caring about anything more than 'drive-by hackers with a pineapple'"?
To the point where sometimes I can't remember on which app I was having which discussion.
I understand the latter, but for the former... it's probably faster to install Signal than to answer to a message on HN.
If everybody just installed Signal (because it's better, even if marginally), then eventually everybody would be on Signal and it would be easy to switch.
Whether you are the problem or not is unrelated to your maleness. Being willing to be and do better is the first step on the journey that enables you to realise that truth.
That was in response to this.
But the hassle is dealing with all these different apps and their separate notifications. I have real app fatigue lately and turn them off for mostly everything.
I think third-party signal apps are just too thin a target for anyone intermediate to bother. Signal itself hardly is. Also, most of the stuff I discuss on these is just banter and stupid memes that people send me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Signal fanatic. I'm just quick at moving to better alternatives. If a better alternative than Signal gets announced in 10min, I'll be on it in 11min and I'll be telling you to try it in 12min :-).
The fact is that Signal is probably the best messaging app we have right now. I get the app fatigue, I don't get why the result of it should be to fight precisely the better alternative. "I hate that we're locked in WhatsApp, but I am actively fighting for keeping us locked in".
If everyone starts using signal I'll go along. But they won't so they're isn't any point. I'll still need WhatsApp so they'll keep tracking me. Signal also has poorer group chats (no subtopics for example) which I use a lot.
And if they get big quickly they'll run out of funds and will have to make similar decisions. They're not going to continue being funded by big tech bros like Brian Acton's 50M$ if their costs balloon. For me to actively promote it and use it without a big userbase, it will have to be so open that I can run my own server, like email. I do run matrix for that reason. I like ownership of my services and I'd rather contribute to the network than donating.
Ps: if he really wanted to help accessible safe communications he shouldn't have sold WhatsApp.
I see more in solutions to thwart their tracking. Such as using a matrix bridge, which I do. I do the same with search, I use a meta-search engine to remove tracking and ads. I can also customise it to my wishes that way.
Well moving from WhatsApp to Signal was one move in the last 10 years. I wouldn't call that "constantly moving". We'd be lucky if there was an alternative worth moving every year, but that's by far not the case.
> I'll still need WhatsApp so they'll keep tracking me.
... you say you're in cybersec, so I would expect you to do better than that. What does WhatsApp track? Metadata. Who writes to whom, when. If you move half of your conversations away from WhatsApp, they lost the metadata from half those conversations. So they effectively track you less. It's not "all or nothing".
> They're not going to continue being funded by big tech bros like Brian Acton's 50M$
Are you sure they've been running on 50M in the last 10 years? They take donations, I would expect this helps quite a bit. 50M doesn't really sound like a lot of money when you have 70 millions active users.
> I do run matrix for that reason.
Matrix is inferior to Signal in many ways, though. And it's not like Matrix is super diverse: most people use Element, right? Federation sounds good, but power laws etc.
> Ps: if he really wanted to help accessible safe communications he shouldn't have sold WhatsApp.
Can you imagine anyone in the world who would not sell WhatsApp for 19 Billions? :-)
> Such as using a matrix bridge
How is that reducing the metadata?
No but the last year I've been asked to go to:
- Telegram for a group chat
- Discord for a support community
- Snapchat by someone who wanted to share pics with me
- Instagram chat by a tattoo artist
- RCS / Google Messages by a friend in America who wants to use iMessage with me (I don't use Apple)
- Signal by a family member
- One person keeps chatting to me on LinkedIn and is annoyed I only reply once a month or so when I happen to log in to it (I have all notifications off and don't use the app of course)
All by different people. I keep saying no more more keep cropping up. Signal isn't the only one. I'm honestly very tired of all that crap. If I promote something new it should not be the same thing, slightly less flawed. It should be a real way forward.
I bridge to matrix now and if a network is not supported there then I won't use it. But I don't actually care about those chat networks. The bridges are just a way to forget they exist. Also, I'm not rolling out a bridge just for one person who wants to talk to me on a new network.
> ... you say you're in cybersec, so I would expect you to do better than that. What does WhatsApp track? Metadata. Who writes to whom, when. If you move half of your conversations away from WhatsApp, they lost the metadata from half those conversations. So they effectively track you less. It's not "all or nothing".
I am but privacy and security issues are very different things. The metadata is not really something I care about. My phone provider knows who I call and what I say, my mail provider knows who I email and what I say. Whatsapp was an improvement over those. It's not ideal but metadata is not a dealbreaker for me. And the thing is, I can't do without Whatsapp. I don't like it, but I'm stuck with it. I do shield it from my phone by using matrix so there is little the app itself can collect.
By the way at work the situation is much worse. My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers (sharepoint et al) and they can access literally everything. Every document, every email, every chat, even the ones I deleted. It's all there and not end to end encrypted so Microsoft can see it too. Of course they sign legalese that they won't look at it but we all know how much that means post-Snowden. My employer is a company that's supposedly cybersecurity-aware. Clearly not enough. I don't have input in such strategic decisions. Still, a whole team of cybersec specialists is OK with this situation. I'm not, which is one of the reasons I don't like my job :) We spend time on stupid little things while freely giving up our entire data.
> Matrix is inferior to Signal in many ways, though.
I don't agree, it is superior for me. I can use whatever client I want, I can use it on any PC or web or mobile device, 20 of them if I want, I can set up my own home server, I can run my own integrations and bots (like a transcription bot running on a local whisper instance, nothing leaked to the cloud). I don't need a phone number to sign up so I can make different accounts for different purposes, just like email addresses on my domain. It is this flexibility I need. I don't want my chats to be locked up in someone else's server. My chats are my data and I should be able to do with it what I want.
Signal doesn't let me sign up without a phone number. It doesn't even have a web version, I have to install their desktop client (which isn't available on BSD). Also Signal misses so much functionality especially for group chats and integrations/bots.
Anyway, we're not going to agree here. I'm not going to help promote Signal and I don't think it's a train worth riding. That's my opinion. It's not the direction I want to move into, I'm truly sick of these walled gardens.
> Are you sure they've been running on 50M in the last 10 years? They take donations, I would expect this helps quite a bit. 50M doesn't really sound like a lot of money when you have 70 millions active users.
No but it is by far the biggest donation they've had. Most people are not going to pay for it, and if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate. They'll end up having to get capital, which will come with strings attached, and the enshittification will start.
The thing is that with something federated that can't really happen. If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own (and in my case this is exactly what I do anyway). Or someone else might start one. Having an open network is the only way I see out of the enshittification spiral.
Is this what the kids say now? Am I getting old?
To be clear, I'm not installing those things either. Everybody has WhatsApp, so that's my fallback, it's a common denominator. Signal is superior, so that's my preference. For personal conversations, I don't use anything else.
Then for work, I have to use the tools we get (be it Slack or Discord or Teams). And when a community is on Slack or Discord or IRC or discourse or whatever they use, well I have to go there to talk to them.
> My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers
Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
> I don't agree, [Matrix] is superior for me.
Out of curiosity, why not Telegram then, if you don't care about privacy and encryption?
> if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate
They currently have 70M active users. Those are not evangelists.
> If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own
Which is more complicated for approximately everybody than "if Signal enshittify, I'll move back to WhatsApp or to the next alternative to Signal".
Matrix brings its lot of issues. For instance, startups obviously wouldn't care, but corporations would never accept "any Matrix client" to connect. So they would somehow want to make sure that their employees use approved clients. I don't think this is currently a thing in Matrix. But even if it was, it means that corporations wouldn't benefit from "I can use any client I want", and chances are that they would self-host and not federate. Better than giving their data to third-parties, but still not the dream of federation or freedom.
For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
All that to say, Matrix does not solve the problems that Signal solves. Matrix solves other problems (well, mostly "I want to self-host a chat and I want something cooler than IRC"), but then it makes sense that Matrix is not a replacement for Signal and Signal is not a replacement for those Matrix use-cases.
Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
> Yes I agree, that's a problem. Slack, Discord, same thing everywhere. Companies should self-host e.g. a matrix server, or at least use a provider from their own country. But I believe that self-hosted Matrix would be better than Slack for companies.
Yes or at least use something that's verifiably E2EE. It's totally possible to use someone else's cloud without giving them any way to read the information stored on it. It's just not really offered by the big names. I think part of the reason is that they love running analysis. Especially Microsoft loves "data-driven" everything.
> For personal use? Normies use the main Matrix server, it's not really federated. And Matrix servers collect a lot of metadata. Wasn't there also security issues, where a Matrix server could inject ghost users into rooms?
Yes but those can be resolved. It's still being developed. And once it gets big there will be more servers, I'm sure. Popular sites and services can host their own and direct their existing users to it.
> Bridging is a weird hack. I have only been confronted to Matrix bridges to IRC channels, and it was making everything worse for IRC users (essentially forcing the IRC users to either move to Matrix or ban the bridges).
Well that's for IRC channels, that bridge multiple users on both sides, yes. But this is for 2 reasons: IRC is more limited than matrix so some stuff has to be crammed in a text field somehow, and many IRC servers don't allow full bridging where the bridge can pretend to be multiple users. Libera is an example, they had some personal conflicts with the matrix team and turned it off. Since then it's difficult because the bot puts the username of the matrix user in the body of each message instead of making it appear to come from the username.
If you bridge 1:1 chats or things like whatsapp groups with one user on the matrix side (which is the case for personal bridges), there is no issue. The whatsapp users don't see anything different. Your messages just show up under your regular name. On the matrix side everyone also shows up as a matrix user, the bridge creates a user for everyone in the group chat (called a 'puppet'). It's quite good. The only thing is that if I run a transcribe bot, its output gets bridged back to the other party I'm talking to, so I redirect those to a separate chat. It would be nice if there was a "don't bridge" flag for messages. Whatsapp has transcribe functionality now, but it only works on the phone, not web. And the quality is awful. Whisper-large which I run a server for, blows it out of the water.
The biggest issue with the whatsapp bridge is that it doesn't do voice or video calls. The telegram bridge works even better because it uses the regular telegram protocol (whatsapp doesn't support third-party clients or bots so it uses a hack through whatsapp web).
Yes. This has been the case since 2008 when the first version of iOS supporting third-party apps was released. Background refresh allows some quanta of work do be done when an app is not in the foreground, but only limited things.