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Why is it so hard to get friends to leave Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, and others? Anyone else feel this? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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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!

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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