What app you americans use for personal conversations?
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
Same in germany. Some people that care a little about security might use Telegram, Signal and/or Threema, but most still use WhatsApp parallel for family and stuff
SMS/RCS for friends/family in meatspace, Discord for friends in cyberspace.
Snapchat still seems to be a default conduit of communication for my family members and their respective friends. I do not have Snapchat and never will. They are mildly annoyed at my stubbornness.
I have yet to meet a single soul in my local circles who is willing to install any messaging platform over any concern of privacy or security. These are very simply not important factors to any of them. It’s upsetting. But, y’know, lead a horse to water, etc.
Discord continues to be a choice platform for my online friends circle. I don’t know so much about any of them, but I almost never use it for 1:1 private messaging. It’s there for the rare aside conversation. But its primary form of use for me is as a big town square in servers with dozens of people. It’s essentially my version of going to the mall after school or to the local pub after work.
There really isn’t a single dominant app/service, though apple and imessages comes close. But, since that’s apple only, it doesn’t truly dominate in the way whatsapp does in some places.
In my local area (a rural mountain zone in the Southeast), the most common single one is telegram. The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
County wide, it’s still Facebook over telegram, but not by much. Then imessage. You can even rely on apple monkeys using one or both of the others since the county school system sends on both of them as well as via SMS for major events.
My kid and most of the high school kids do discord among themselves, but still use the others away from that.
Tbh, though, I have come to prefer not having a single messaging service be dominant. It was (and still can be) a pain in the ass using multiple apps, but at least you’re not totally fucked if you refuse to use whatever else the majority have decided to use because it’s easier.
There was a huge problem with it being over used by the mayor’s office as a semi official channel. When the mayor got himself into a bit of trouble, those folks that were working to get him ousted made a big deal out of him corporatizing the office of mayor and town business in that way, and it made sense to use it as a tool against him. He was trying to treat it like if he said something there, it was a done deal, and it counted as some kind of replacement for posting such things publicly.
The push was from a group of like minded residents that included the county sheriff, the chief of police, myself, and the librarian. I can’t truly say anyone led the push, though the librarian would come closest. We all just got sick of him, and used what we could to get people moving against him. People were starting to hate Facebook locally because of some school drama anyway, so it was easy enough to stoke that fire.
Get people from the various town departments to stop using it, get their families and friends to help convince them if they weren’t on board. If he can’t reach anyone via messenger that’s part of the local government, it cuts that out, and ties him into the whole arguments over school aged access to Facebook in general.
It worked! Which was a bit of a surprise to all involved. But it was the right confluence of events. He was fucking up with covid issues, fucking up the people that actually run the town on a direct basis, and doing so while being an asshole as a person. There was no way he was winning the next election, but he could fuck things up before then.
Once the entire police force officially abandoned messenger, it was a bit of a death knell. Individual officers still used it, but the group chats he was using died totally.
I have run into this kind of thing a lot. Once, on reddit, I got accused of lying because I wrote a pretty personal story with a little style. I write more casually and get crap for not paying attention to perfect grammar and typing. I stay to bland recital of facts and now I’m boring. I tell a simple story here with no embellishments, and I’m a bot lol.
Fwiw, I have published three books in my life so far. I’ve done custom fiction for people, and some research and reporting freelance stuff too. I’m not saying I’m a great writer or anything, just that bots try to mimic what jabronie writers do. They get fed data from articles written by people that follow basic style guidelines, like keeping paragraphs to manageable sizes, using accessible but (hopefully) clear grammar rather than fully formal.
So it’s no surprise I end up looking like a bot, fellow human.
iMessage for other Apple users; for Android people I force them to download Signal because fuck SMS surveillance, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp and the Telegram train wreck.
I admittedly don’t know much about RCS but I know Apple won’t switch until they’re forced to.
If it allows some proprietary stuff to run on top of it I think Apple would be more inclined to switch (they could put iOS-only/iMessage stuff on top of it). Or not: it seems like they already love their iMessage codebase so probably they’ll just support both when they’re forced to implement RCS.
iMessage/SMS and Messenger are what most of my friends use. Although I know people who use Snapchat at work. I don’t anyone who uses Telegram or Signal.
So I’m actually an immigrant (Indian) but I came over super young so I guess it counts. WhatsApp with family, normal SMS for everything else. If I could, I would use Signal for everything but it’s kind of hard to get your massive Indian family to all switch from something they’ve used for a decade and a half.
No, it was a lighthearted joke. I genuinely have had almost nothing but good experiences with Canadians. Like, 8/10 encounters with unknown fellow Americans is anything from indifferent to bad. Canadians, it’s been more like 1/10 is bad. Mind you, one of those was trying to bang my mom and grabbed my ass, so he can continue fucking right off lol.
Have you never run across that before though? Where you make fun of a bad stereotype? Like, Americans treating canada like an extension is a common enough thing that I see it online all the time as a serious thing, so it becomes a joke in itself.
No it’s really typical banter, it’s just with Americans you can’t be sure how aware they are. Same with Chinese if you can talk to them, apparently; it must be a byproduct of being a giant self-contained hyperpower.
I’m pretty curious to know what got a bunch of prairie farmers on WhatsApp, but I suspect it leads back to India fairly quickly. Unfortunately, French-speaking Indians are a rare breed.
There are a couple people who are too lazy to get Signal, and they got iPhones, so I set up an iMessage server to forward messages to my GrapheneOS phone.
But the communication there is extremely sparse and surface level. It’s basically just a touch point. The real conversations all go through Signal.
I want to do something like this but airmessage does not have a desktop client that works without using their clouds. I use a Apple phone but I just want to be able to respond to texts on my Linux computers. I have an iMac server that I vnc into but it’s kind of annoying just to respond to a text.
Add comment