I’ve been seeing this more and more in comments, and it’s got me wondering just how big this issue really is. A lot of people feel trapped in apps like Discord, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but can’t get their friends to leave.
It’s really annoying when you suggest trying something new, whether it’s a different app or just not using these platforms so much but sometimes it can feel like no one wants to go first.
So I’m curious, what apps do you feel most trapped in? And have you tried convincing your friends to leave them? What happened? Is it an issue for you, or are you just going along with the flow?
Looking forward to hearing if this is as common as it feels!
It’s Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for me. I ditched the Facebook app a long time ago, but Messenger and Whatsapp remain on my device because no one wants to leave them. I try to keep my chats there as superficial as possible.
Also, this is my first comment ever on Lemmy, so hi everyone!
Welcome. A reminder for in case you don’t know, if it starts to feel stale, then it’s probably because of your viewing settings. If you switch it from Active (ironically, the least active), to Hot, 6 hours, Scaled, etc. after you’ve gone through all of the new to you posts, you’ll see a lot more action.
Thanks for the tip!
All your chat history has been published to the fediverse now. Welcome to Lemmy.
Welcome to lemmy!
Welcome!
Some tips:
-
You can block other users, other communities, and other instances yourself; you don’t have to wait for the mods or admins to do that for you
-
If a mod or an admin of an instance choose to block certain things that you disagree with, you can sign up for another instance with your same name, assuming nobody’s taken it; you won’t be able to transfer your comments, votes, or posts though; there’s been feedback given to the Lemmy devs about this
-
Search by Everything and Active to see new posts show up in your feed daily
-
There’s lots of diverse opinions on Lemmy, but they tend to concentrate around politics and tech; maybe consider starting your own community or instance if there’s something here you want to see!
-
To use the Discord analogy, Lemmy instances are Discord communities, Lemmy communities are Discord channels, and users are just users; we’ll often write c/Whatever to refer to a community, but due to the Federated nature of Lemmy, you may find a community like c/Politics on multiple instances (like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml); not sure if the Lemmy devs have a fix for this
-
Asking people to leave things means they’re losing a line of communication to friends, family, and interest groups who still use those things. It’s probably more productive to ask people to add the services you prefer rather than leave the ones they’re used to.
I’ve encountered some resistance from Americans who use iPhones and hate the idea of adding a third-party messaging app. None of them seem very interested in justifying that position.
Networking effect
People use whatever is most popular even if its the shittest thing such as Facebook.
Only time people will care is when it personally and tangibly affects them.
For Facebook/whatsapp watomatic can be used to remind people you are leaving or such.
I remember when Snapchat was extremely popular for messaging. One of the worst apps I’ve ever used. Just an absolutely atrocious UI.
It’s because our marketing sucks. People don’t care about their privacy, they like what is cool. So what does that mean? It mean we gotta make using open source app so cool that people can’t help but join because all the cool kids are here. You feel me? Preaching alone is not enough although it will benefit all of us
People don’t typically like change. It has to feel like it’s their decision to drive them there.
Discord is a hard one because it has some uniqueness to it.
It has bots, text channels, voice channels, and hundreds of thousands of people can join it if you need to.
A lot of my college clubs use it and there are a few thousand students in our biggest ones
It’s not unique, it’s just XMPP + Mumble.
I used to play with a large community and every time a new game would come out we’d always setup forum software, an XMPP (chat software) server and a Mumble server for that game. This was pretty easy to get done because we were all working in tech, but if you were an average gamer it wasn’t something that you could handle.
Discord packaged the text, voice and forum software into one application and they handle the server hosting. It only costs all of your privacy and $10/mo.
You say it’s not unique and then list the ways it’s unique by packaging up multiple different services into 1.
Totally agree it’s a privacy nightmare but you discredit the service too much. There’s a reason it’s widely adopted the way it is, and it’s not because it’s the same as everything else.
It isn’t unique, it provides text, voice and video chatting. These are not new services to the world of technology.
What makes Discord stand apart is that they require that your chats, calls and streams are not private and, in exchange for people giving up their private data the users only have to install one piece of software instead of two. It is like a company giving people a ‘free’ phone as long as they or their advertisers can listen into the calls, read the texts and look at the videos on the phone.
The only thing that Discord does is to package the software in such a way that you can’t access it until you give them information about you and then they gate features behind you identifying yourself with a credit card and a phone number.
Maybe I’ll give this a shot when I have some free time.
TIL that discord is not part of the fediverse.
Probably the idea of “all my other friends are on the mainstream platform so why would i move to another platform specifically for you?”
What are some good alternatives to discord?
matrix works pretty well as a discord replacement, it’s sometimes unreliable when you’re using a selfhosted instance but I’d wager it’d work smooth enough for a non techie if you turn off end to end encryption
I ditched meta platforms entirely for signal in 2019, lets say I dont have many close friends anymore haha, my social life is kaput, even my work groupchat is on facebook
People can’t be convinced of anything, it’s a losing battle to try. The only way to get people to change is to live a certain way and if people admire it, then they ask you about it and you share.
So for example-I’m a minimalist and I really wished my sister would declutter because her place is overcrowded. But instead of trying to convince her, I just shared what my life normally was like. Eventually she asked me for help decluttering, and she felt a lot better about what I helped with. Now we share cleaning and organization tips.
For me, I just put in my insta bio I left for Pixelfed and to come friend me there.
I’ve told my friends I’m off insta because I’d rather be on a platform where I control my feed that’s ad free. And that I rarely see my friends content on insta so it doesn’t matter that much to me to have friends on there. If they get interested, great if not, I’m still happy.
SMS
Nobody wants to use a messaging app at all. At this point I’d rather be stuck on WhatsApp. But its all family. Big family and try to get them to agree on anything is like pulling teeth.
I even sent everybody a “contact card” I made with my links to signal, simplex, and even whatsapp (figuring that’s the path of least resistance) saying I’d prefer to communicate on any of those apps. ZERO people changed nor did they even ask about it, options, or my reasoning.
I did a similar contact card thing for (real) people I cared about from Discord. 2 people installed signal to keep up. 20+ invites went out before I nuked they account. One person already had signal. The other one that installed it now ghosts all my signal comms attempts.
I convinced my friends to get Discord so we could communicate as a community without Facebook. Now I have figured out it is just as bad. I tried Matrix and couldn’t figure out how to log in before I heard it’s enshittification is underway.
Endhittification is often the result of an established centralized platform that got that way via giving unfairly good deals because they had a lot of investment becoming suddenly greedy and controlling to make that money back. Matrix, meanwhile, is just a protocol. It quite literally cannot be enshittified unless the protocol is updated to do something a certain way that benefits the developers over the users, because a user can simply switch providers. Even though the org that develops it is also a provider and I hear they’re going freemium, that is a service that costs money to render. I’m not surprised they need more money to offer hosting and maintain the software behind it. Unless the protocol is being modified in a way that hinders or scams us or steals our data, saying matrix is enshittifying is like saying email or HTTP is enshittifying.
So then it is still worthwhile to try to host a matrix server? Cool. I guess I need to get the login part figured out so I can try it first. I think DBZer0 has one I can try. Thanks for explaining. I am in a hurry to try it now so my friends have yet somewhere else to go.
Discord for me. A bunch of my family and friends are avid gamers. Discord is the universal standard app they all use for general communication.
Not only do they use it for all their gaming related stuff, they have additional servers and channels for just chilling, chatting, off topic stuff, memes, politics, etc etc.
It’s the network effect. Even if there was an open source app that perfectly replicated all the functionality of Discord and was just as simple to install and run as Discord, most of them still wouldn’t switch to it, because all of their friends and family are still on Discord.
So they would have to have two completely separate apps with totally separate social groups to maintain, and nobody but hardcore advocates for FOSS and privacy are willing to do that.
Sure, I have Discord, Matrix, IRC, Signal, XMPP clients, and a Private Mumble server, all on my systems, but I’m hardcore about FOSS. None of my friends and family are willing to do that. It took all my energy to convince two of my most techie friends just to get Signal on their phones. And only One has been willing to install a Matrix client to chat just with me.
Because people keep pushing for them to completely leave a platform.
Instead try to get them to dual-use platforms.
One of the big problems nowadays is proprietary protocols. Back in the day, you could have a single client that could talk to different networks. Today you have to run a bunch of separate apps, and what’s worse is that a lot of them are built with stuff like Electron that’s resource hungry.
Even the FOSS apps don’t all get along.
Conversations is great for XMPP, and it can act as a UnifiedPush pusher, but AFAICT it doesn’t support other protocols and it doesn’t act as a UnifiedPush subscriber.
So running 2 chat protocols, one being the well-support app Conversations on the well-supported protocol XMPP, means 2 push setups and 2 apps. Bleh.
I would like to see an architecture where the expensive app side of things is separated from the protocol. But that’s all speculative, I haven’t put work hours into it. Basically, if I have an idea for P2P chat, why do I need to re-invent emojis and channels and shit like that? I only want to iterate on transport. And if I have a better idea for channels, why would I have to re-invent the transport like XMPP and Matrix?
(The reason is that cutting those two apart is hard - But I will continue to wonder.)
Oh yeah the whole thing is a mess. It kind of blows my mind that we still don’t have a single common protocol that at least the open source world agrees on. Like there is a more or less fixed set of things chat apps need to do, we should be able to agree on something akin to ActivityPub here as a base.
I less have an issue with people getting trapped in software they understand is insecure, and more with people who will push shit like telegram and pretend its the most private and secure thing ever invented. If they want to use discord, sure, fine with me. As long as they know not to do their activist work on discord I’m fine with it. People doing activist work/planning over telegram will never make me not cringe.
Signal isn’t something I personally want to use, but its tolerable, and it was doing a good job of replacing telegram in activist spaces I felt, but I’ve recently seen a few different groups using telegram again because they don’t trust signal.
xmpp with omemo is what I wish I could get people to use but uh, well, that just will never happen.
How do you set up XMPP with OMEMO as anonymously as possible? My friend and I would love to video call each other, currently we’re using SimpleX for this, but it’s very buggy. We use Molly for calling and SimpleX for texting, both of us are switching to using Libreboot laptops with QubesOS to communicate :)
I love teaching my friend privacy. He’s really gotten into it, I’ve done a good job making him just as paranoid as I am!
I’m gonna be honest, its been so long since I’ve actually had people to set it up and use it with that even I would need to spend a day and a half figuring out how to set it up again.
