Because of the number of groups that literally only communicate via Facebook and Facebook marketplace replacing everything else like it.
this genuinely made getting an apartment such a total nightmare. Every “group” online for finding apartments in my city is Facebook only. Sure, craigslist works but it’s filled with out-of-date realty company spam. If you want to avoid facebook the easiest way is just word of mouth but that’s difficult for people moving in from out of town. I ended up getting my current place by emailing a guy who I heard about from a friend.
In my case, that but WhatsApp. Can’t live without it, as much as I’d like.
Don’t you feel that WhatsApp is sufficiently insulated from the normal practices of Facebook/Meta/the Zuckerverse though?
Perhaps it’s my naivety, but I’ve never really seen the point of them owning WhatsApp, especially since it integrated e2e encryption and has fought the EU to keep it. From an end-user perspective, it’s just a pretty polished, widely used (and thus useful), and decently private/secure messaging application. I could see the appeal of moving to a Signal, Session, etc., except for their relatively low uptake among the general public where I am.
Yeah, it’s a decent app with less overreach seeping in from Meta compared with Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Still, it makes me uncomfortable that many communities that I value greatly would be out of my reach if it were to stop using it. For now it’s not a problem, but I’m hyper-aware of the danger.
I’ve just seen the actions Meta’s taken, and as such I believe nothing they say. I was on my family’s WhatsApp group chat until the buyout.
SMS is fine for most things domestically. Signal’s there for international and edge cases. Most of my family are on Signal; there’s just not a group there, and I view this as a feature.
