Meta discontinues Messenger Lite for Android, it will be unavailable after Sep 18. Users need to install regular Messenger app instead

I have not found any news article on this on a whim. Because my friends and family, I need to use Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Lite was a OK client - lightweight, no unnecessary features, etc., compared to the regular Messenger app.

Now I’m a little torn, having a Meta app on my phone is already bad, but having to downgrade to the bloated Messenger app? Not sure I will make a change. What are your thoughts?

Deestan,

This sucks.

Can’t ditch it completely due to family, but got a few more contacts over on Signal after this announcement.

whatisallthis,

I don’t use Facebook so I don’t know -

Why can’t you just have a group text with your family.

cnnrduncan,

Because SMS doesn’t support group chats and MMS is expensive garbage (50c/300kb is fucked)

HeartyBeast,
HeartyBeast avatar

Just log in to Facebook on desktop every couple of days. If they want speedy responses, they will know yto try an aternative medium.

Jaysyn,
Jaysyn avatar

Lots of options aside from Facebook.

Hyperreality,

Not if you need to communicate with people who use facebook.

Johandea,

Lots of options for other people

/s

TheEntity,

Not if it's them that need to communicate with me.

NecroMemories,

Not incredibly surprising given how little it’s been updated and how things like clicking links doesn’t work. Definitely exhausted by how aggressively things are just getting worse now.

Stalinwolf, (edited )
@Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca avatar

Yeah, both Messenger Lite and Facebook Lite are fucked. Post a photo or video on Facebook Lite and it’s guaranteed to be blurry piece of shit. If it’s shot horizontal, it’s going to be low-res vertical with letterboxing on the top and bottom. I have to hop on the main app just to post a discernable video for my family.

If I didn’t live on the other side of the continent and Facebook were my only real lifeline to my friends and family, I wouldn’t use it at all anymore. But now there’s this sunken-cost fallacy shit on top of it all, and how I get daily memories from the deceased like my father and grandmother. “Hope you’re having fun in Canada, love you, Gram”. Some of these messages are still applicable today, and I don’t know how to separate from that.

Rekorse,

All you are saying is its too convenient for you to stop using it. What makes it less convenient is learning about alternative ways to meet the same ends.

You'll find like a lot of others that giving up control to Facebook doesn't necessarily equate to the most convenient tool

mihnt,
mihnt avatar

and I don’t know how to separate from that.

Take screenshots, load them all into a folder and use some kind of gallery widget or app to show you one daily.

I think I've seen calendars that will show you an image a day but I don't know how well you can set images to certain days, etc.

S0L1DX,

Welp that’s not happening, so long Myspace, I mean book of faces

Blackmist,

Users need to install regular Messenger app instead

No, they don’t.

bankimu,

Lol yeah not gonna happen.

archchan,

Just gonna leave this here: https://www.signal.org/

piratepiracy,

Well, family at least is going to be willing to switch to signal…

Neon_Dystopia,

Just delete every meta/fb app. There are plenty of alternatives now. They will never love you.

fades,

If people are still playing within meta’s walls they are lost and won’t be leaving anytime soon.

But all my friends are on there! M-m-my followers!!!

They didn’t miss the boat, they straight up ignored it. Nothing has changed so why should their poorly reasoned decision?

corsicanguppy,

Nope.

It’ll die.

We’re all on another app anyway.

DraagDunk,

I have personally made a switch to Delta Chat, and will be e-mailing people from now on. I will be checking facebook occasionally, as I face the same issue as others in this thread: Facebook is the default communication tool in my country. However, I have told everyone I’m connected with, that I no longer have a mobile app for facebook communication on my phone, and will only respond swiftly og they use e-mail or SMS. Let’s see how that goes.

lemmur,

you can go 1 step further and try to use signal, It’s much more convenient.

kilgore_trout,

Your contacts would all need to sign up on Signal as well, while they already have an e-mail address.

madis,

Well, at least the full app has the opt-in E2EE chats.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

You can use Facebook Lite instead of the main Messenger app if you want to. It’s got messaging integrated into it.

yoreel,

For now…

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I doubt Facebook Lite is going anywhere - it’s needed in poorer regions where very old phones are used. Lite renders a lot of its UI on a server (similar to how Opera Mini works) which is how it’s so lightweight.

avidamoeba,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Something like Island/Insular/Shelter might help. I just discovered these apps recently and am currently testing Shelter. It seems to work.

smileyhead,

Why still use Facebook when we have the Internet?

smileyhead,

The only and I say the only good thing I can say about Facebook Messenger is… umm…

Can somebody name at least one thing? Really, this app is shit but we must find one at least.

Cethin,

Back when people used Facebook, it was a convenient way to connect people to chats quickly and easily. I don’t think that’s the case anymore though.

smileyhead,

It isn’t. Adding someone is always digging through people with the same name and searching for “that one with glasses on profile picture”. There are some codes to scan, but they are Facebook’s custom format incompatible with QR code scanners and inconvinient to use.

jarfil,

Some of my late mum’s friends only use Facebook. Not saying it’s ideal, but… a single good thing, right?

Zagorath,
@Zagorath@aussie.zone avatar

At least in Australia it’s by far the most popular messenger app. It wins by a landslide thanks to the network effect.

irasponsible,

Yeah, there’s no real alternative here. Use messenger or Don’t talk to people.

smileyhead,

Because we have standards for at least 20 years for messaging I think we can’t say that networking effect is upside of some app, but rather the fact that everyone must use the same app is a downside.

Overzeetop,

Facebook Messenger is probably the closest thing to a modern Yellow Pages as we have. Not everybody is on there, but most people are - even if they haven’t checked their profile in years. With the fall of landlines, it can be the easiest (or only) way to find/contact someone - especially if you’re a GenX or early Millennial because we have all dropped out landlines, but we created most of our social connections before any other messaging service existed. Heck, almost none of the people I knew from college in the 90s even had an email address that they stuck with (assuming I actually had email logs going back thirty years). It’s nice that so many message services exist, but most have no way to “look someone up” the way it’s possible to do on something like messenger/fb. (admittedly - it’s both good and bad)

I suppose there’s a chance that LinkedIn is the other major database of real names out there; I’ve never tried it for locating people.

realharo,

Yes, people using it as the main messaging app is still preferable to the situation in the US where people on different mobile platforms can’t message each other without bullshit compatibility issues and bubble colors.

At least here it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on - including desktops and the web - and as a result nobody cares.

Of course, the same is true for almost every other messaging service too, and there are better ones out there.

BuboScandiacus,
@BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz avatar

In many countries it’s the default communication app

jarfil,

Old people are there, some we care about, some have passed away…

There are a few decent communities out there too. Not many, but a few.

SkepticElliptic,

Marketplace became the defacto replacement for craigslist in my area 😔

acastcandream,

It’s the only reason I use it and, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s really well done/seamless/painless to use. Literally the only good think on FB (until they inevitably ruin it too). Has fantastic consumer protections.

zikk_transport2,

Install Telegram (or Signal before everyone downvotes me) for your family & friends. For me most of my friends & relatives migrated to it and using for chats between themselves.

Bonus if you are good at programming and can make some very unique telegram bots that do some interesting stuff, like reporting local news.

dsmk,

I use Telegram every day, but without end-to-end encryption (by default and on groups), it’s as private as Facebook Messenger. They can read everything. The only difference is that currently people trust them more than they trust Facebook, but everything turns to shit eventually.

If Signal is too “boring” or no one uses it in your circles, try WhatsApp. Yes, it’s also from Meta, but at least comms are encrypted (same protocol as Signal) and a lot of people use it.

jack,

Really bad advice. Trading Meta app for Meta app. It is proprietary so you can be sure WhatsApp does not have encryption like Signal

dsmk,

WhatsApp uses the Signal Protocol. Is it as private as Signal? No, it “leaks” way more metadata. Have I personally checked if they’re encrypting messages? Also no, although others have. Is it possible that they’re doing something “funny” and no longer encrypt? Yes, but is there any suggestion or proof of that being the case?

Should you use WhatsApp? No, but the suggestion above was to use Telegram, a service that doesn’t do end-to-end encryption by default and leaks the same type of data as WhatsApp. Going from Messenger to Telegram is a sideways move. From Messenger to WhatsApp would be at least a small upgrade (with the benefit of having more contacts there than Telegram, at least in some countries).

I understand the point about it also being a Meta app. I guess the question is what do you trust more? Telegram and the people behind it with your plain text messages or a Meta app with end-to-end encryption? I don’t trust either, so I pick encryption.

I’m not anti Telegram or anything like that. It’s a nice app, lots of features, smooth, etc, and I use it, but privacy was never their main priority.

Satine,

Where can I get info on Telegram storing messages in plain text on their servers? I have asked and searched and all I have seen are hypotheticals but nothing concrete.

I’ve read through the audit they had in 2020 where cloud chats are encrypted using the same MT Proto 2.0 which they also use for the secret chats (E2EE).

The same way that evidence is available, I would also like to see the evidence of cloud chats stored in plain text and not encrypted.

dsmk, (edited )

I didn’t say anything about them “storing messages in plain text”. I said that they don’t do E2EE by default and since they have the keys for the TLS that encrypts data in transit, they can read the content of your messages. Encrypting their drives - something that any decent service does - only protects you if someone “steals” a drive: Telegram has the keys and can obviously read the contents of their drives.

I found this Kaspersky blog post which provides a nice tl;dr. They even make the same point as me:

Let’s go straight to the root of the problem: Telegram is a unique messenger with two types of chats: regular and secret. Regular chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Only secret ones are.

No other messenger does this: even the notorious WhatsApp, part of Mark Zuckerberg’s data-hungry empire, uses end-to-end encryption by default. The user doesn’t need to do anything at all, there are no special checkboxes or anything: messages are protected from all outsiders (including the service owners) right out of the box.

[…]

This is not new. Back in 2015, Edward Snowden had this to say about Telegram’s defaults:

I respect @durov, but Ptacek is right: @telegram’s defaults are dangerous. Without a major update, it’s unsafe. [source]

To be clear, what matters is that the plaintext of messages is accessible to the server (or service provider), not whether it’s “stored.” [source]

In practice, they’re no different from Messenger, Slack, Discord or a direct message on Reddit. Most messages on Telegram can be read by them, just like Google can read all messages in your Gmail.

Why is Signal or WhatsApp better? Because they do E2EE for all messages. It doesn’t matter if they forget to encrypt their servers, all they see and store is encrypted messages. You hold the keys, not them.

Satine,

You mentioned “plain text” specifically - where else would they be holding those plain texts?

So far, there is no evidence to suggest your messages are stored in plain text. And in 2015, Telegram was using MTProto 1.0 for their cloud chat encryption and Secret Chats E2EE. It’s been about 5-6 years since they’ve upgraded to MTProto 2.0 which has been proven to be a sound encryption protocol.

It was Moxie Marlinspike that also made the claim messages are stored in plain text on Telegram’s server with no evidence. And so far, the only thing we have are hypotheticals and nothing of substance to support that claim.

The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.

Hopefully soon they will roll out Secret Group chats. But I do like we all have the option to use Telegram however we want.

dsmk,

If you (user 1) are talking with your friend (user 2) through me (telegram) and I have the encryption keys, then for me (telegram) communications are essentially in plain text. I can even encrypt them 100 times… I have the keys and can read your (user 1 + user 2) messages.

You’re again talking about storing messages (not sure why). Telegram might encrypt their storage (I never claimed they didn’t), but they have the keys and therefore can read what’s stored. They also have the keys for the messages, so there’s no hypotheticals or claims here: they have the keys for everything, so they can read everything.

E2EE is opt-in and currently only available for direct chats. Unless you manually start a “secret chat”, there’s no E2EE MTProto 2.0 to help you. They can read everything.

The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.

So… Telegram has the keys to decrypt your messages?

I mean, it’s not hard to understand. The party that holds the keys can read the messages.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Messenger supports end-to-end encrypted chats, and more encryption features are rolling out. messengernews.fb.com/…/expanding-testing-for-end-…. It’s a huge project to implement encryption given the number of features that have to be rewritten (e.g. scraping URLs to show a preview picture now has to be done client-side rather than server-side)

cnnrduncan,

Unfortunately FB Messenger is the defacto way to communicate in some countries - if I refused to use it I’d fail uni as I wouldn’t be able to communicate with group members, I wouldn’t be able to contact most of my family, and the number of friends I can talk to would drop to about 5 (of which most have recently had children and are thus a bit preoccupied)

01189998819991197253,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

You (op) use telegram, and make a relay bot that redirects messages to/from fb messenger. You use the app of your choice, and they use the app of theirs. Big downside, is you’re still reliant on fb for messages.

zikk_transport2,

Can you even make a messenger bot? Last time I checked it had bots, but they were incredibly crappy.

01189998819991197253,
@01189998819991197253@infosec.pub avatar

I know of someone who made one a while back, but I don’t know if it would work with the current version of messenger. It’d be a fun project to figure that out, though. I’ll add it to the growing list of fun projects haha

JoshuaACasey,

Better idea don’t install messenger at all

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