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BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.

I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.

The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.

thevillagechief

14 days ago

Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.

abustamam

13 days ago

13 days ago

Multimedia "texts" are actually MMS. In fact, if you send more than 160 characters, those are also MMS because it's an extension of the SMS standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.

WesolyKubeczek

13 days ago

Aren’t SMS that are over 160 characters being concatenated? There used to be a standard for that.

AnssiH

13 days ago

Generally yes.

I guess a phone/app could exist that does convert to MMS instead, though, since the app can make that decision.

vladvasiliu

13 days ago

In France, I'm "charged" for MMS, too. But that's actually considered "data", so it's deducted from the "internet" envelope which is quite generous (at least for my needs: I have multiple dozens of GB for under 10 € a month, of which I only ever went above 10 when backing up photos during a vacation with no wifi).

hei-lima

11 days ago

I'm not talking about the EU... That alone proves my point. SMS is/was more expensive worldwide.

franga2000

11 days ago

Yes, but there are also plenty of countries where mobile data or even smartphones aren't nearly as universal as they might be in the places where most people use whatsapp. There, people use mostly SMS and phone calls. Whatsapp and the like are the thing you use when SMS/calls would be too expensive, so international.

Both of these exist, as do middle grounds between them.

I'm in only one WhatsApp group with someone local, everyone else in my chats is from abroad. Yet I'm from a country with dirt cheap data and nearly universal smartphone ownership. People just don't use WA here for whatever reason. But drive an hour across the border and suddenly everyone is on WhatsApp.

mbivert

13 days ago

depends where; in France you can get unlimited SMS/MMS/calls, plus 350Go of data, for 20€/month [0]. it's surprising the market hasn't developed likewise in other (European) countries; I (genuinely) wonder why − perhaps legal issues of some sort?

edit: okay, sending MMS isn't always free, depends on the countries[1]. still free for USA, Europe, Canada, etc.

[0]: https://mobile.free.fr/fiche-forfait-free

[1]: https://mobile.free.fr/docs/bt/tarifs.pdf

laurencerowe

11 days ago

I think it’s more historical at this point. 20 years ago SMS was expensive in Europe as we had cheap plans and expensive calls/texts vs US which had expensive plans but free calls/texts. That made things like WhatsApp take off in Europe while Americans would just SMS.

(Although most Americans have iPhones so just transparently avoid SMS for most of their conversations.)

StopDisinfo910

12 days ago

There is no in the EU here. I had unlimited SMS in a sub 20€ plan more than a decade ago in France. I now have unlimited sms, unlimited calls and unlimited data in a sub 15€ plan.

I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.

abanana

13 days ago

SMS is text only. If you're sending an image, you're not using SMS, you're using MMS.

There are phone deals that include unlimited SMS messages, but not MMS.

bossyTeacher

13 days ago

Try searching for that message you send 5 years ago in Whatsapp vs SMS. Retrieval speed is unmatched. SMS wins.

13 days ago

> My friends all younger than me prefer Discord.

That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.

Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?

miki123211

13 days ago

Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."

nozzlegear

13 days ago

13 days ago

Yeah I hate SMS. I don't want my carrier to be involved in the content of my communications. Also I normally use the computer when at home, no point using a tiny mobile device obviously.

I don't use Google or Apple accounts either so RCS is out too. WhatsApp is meta now unfortunately but for historical reasons there's no avoiding it here.

I use WhatsApp and Telegram pretty much exclusively (telegram more for group chats)

vladvasiliu

13 days ago

> I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.

I live in one such country, and indeed, the bulk of my usage is to coordinate with local groups based in the same city.

But tend to meet many people from the US who don't live here, and they all straight up ask for my whatsapp.

I'm also a heavy telegram and signal user, and can't recall a single instance of anybody mentioning these.

joe_mamba

14 days ago

>The regional limit makes it pretty much useless.

Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.

neves

13 days ago

Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.

It's not a technical problem. It's a political one

speleding

13 days ago

Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.

The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).

ForHackernews

13 days ago

Email has solved that problem already.

showsover

12 days ago

Claiming email has solved spam is a WILD take as 45% of current email traffic is spam.

ForHackernews

12 days ago

How much of that shows up in your inbox? I don't care about packets that are dropped by my firewall.

lmz

11 days ago

I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

> Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.

I don't know if you know this, but the EU cannot force a company to obey EU laws outside of the EU.

neko-kai

13 days ago

Yes, it can. And it has done so before.

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

Care to provide a link where the EU can tell a US company how to do business in Brazil (random country)?

neko-kai

13 days ago

Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well.

'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU.

Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU. Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.

fooker

13 days ago

13 days ago

To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.

I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.

wolvoleo

tonyhart7

13 days ago

You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"

expedition32

13 days ago

Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated.

Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.

chii

13 days ago

> But that is marketing not coding.

it's the network effect.

If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.

AnthonyMouse

13 days ago

Being implacably stubborn is underrated. People can trivially have two messaging apps on their phone, which means they can all still contact you while using WhatsApp with other people. Then they all slowly end up with Signal on their phone, at which point who needs WhatsApp at all?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

12 days ago

> Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup)

This can't be a barrier to adoption in practice because most people don't even know that it's a thing in order to consider it as a difference, and anyone who both does and cares about it from the outset would have no trouble setting up automatic backups with Signal, and then appreciate the privacy advantage.

> Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/9971667844506-S...

> If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.

There is no actual reason to use Whatsapp except for the network effect.

chii

13 days ago

> Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.

AnthonyMouse

13 days ago

Succeeding a small percentage of the time results in dramatically more success than having no one even try.

Also, you're promoting defeatism. If it's just you and you succeed 1% of the time, it still helps a little. If it's millions of people -- even if that's a small minority of the population -- and they each succeed 1% of the time, that's actually a lot of groups getting converted. And it's more likely to succeed the more people in each group who do it.

So the conclusion should be that everybody should do it, since that improves everybody's odds, rather than that nobody should.

chii

11 days ago

You didnt calculate in the cost of failure. The success of someone being unreasonable might return good results for everyone else (but this is not known ahead of time - otherwise, it would not be considered unreasonable before the success!)

Therefore, you risk the loss resulting from a failure.

It's why you don't just use this argument to gamble or buy lottery tickets.

zarzavat

13 days ago

If it's so easy to replicate, why isn't there any other app that has replicated it?

Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.

Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.

bornfreddy

13 days ago

Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?

j1elo

13 days ago

Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:

  Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/

I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.

bornfreddy

11 days ago

That sounds interesting, though a short search revealed this method is not very user friendly [0]. Still, if it works... Thank you!

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/11oiwse/working_a...

computerfriend

13 days ago

Signal has exports.

neves

13 days ago

Which non hacker news user exports chats?

I'm the only person I know who ever did it.

popol12

13 days ago

They released cloud backups recently and I believe they are also working on manual exports on iOS too

Scarblac

14 days ago

There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.

prmoustache

13 days ago

> agreed upon

That is the main issue.

There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.

The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.

anonzzzies

14 days ago

I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.

I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).

maqp

> Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/e

What about Deltachat/Arcanechat?

joe_mamba

14 days ago

You realize that at the end of your sentence you've contradicted everything you've said from the start until that point, right?

Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.

kelvinjps10

13 days ago

It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

> Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps

Are you on some funny medication or something? ROTFL.

13 days ago

> Not everyone has overseas contacts

It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.

Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?

prmoustache

13 days ago

We live in a global world and this is super common nowadays. In my own family 2 out of 3 sibling are married with someone who was born in a different continent, one in Asia, the other in Latin America.

And we both met them here in Europe.

People are so welcoming in latin america that when you marry someone, you literally marry the whole extended family. After just a handful of years is not like my partner's aunts and cousins are strangers to me. I can contact them anytime for advice on a topic related to their work/career field and they will do so about mine.

Add to that some cousins and friends who moved overseas and I have many regular contacts that live more than 10000km away from me.

krick

12 days ago

I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it.

So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.

krzyk

13 days ago

It is an unique feature.

Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.

miki123211

13 days ago

"on your own Continent" != "in the EU."

Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.

krzyk

13 days ago

This is for EAA, which includes Switzerland, Norway and even Turkey.

Yes, it does not include UK, but that's on them.

I encourage people living in other countries to complain to their goverment on Metas policies.

Tom1380

13 days ago

I'm in Switzerland and I can confirm that it applies here too

dfajgljsldkjag

14 days ago

It's better than nothing. If you have a different app and want to talk to your friend who uses whatsapp it's much easier to convince him to toggle a setting than to download a different app.

13 days ago

That depends which group is offering more money today. Gemini is integrated into the search and comes before any results so it might not need any ads.

philipallstar

13 days ago

What web standard is this?

jstummbillig

14 days ago

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.

And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.

echelon

14 days ago

How long?

Lina Khan didn't move fast enough, then she was shown the door.

Maybe the EU will persist where the US FTC/DOJ could not?

Nextgrid

14 days ago

> Give them some time to cook

How long? I'm still waiting for the GDPR to actually be enforced meaningfully.

gf000

14 days ago

You can get some really hefty fines for not playing by the rules. It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe. It's not enforced hard enough against US company empires like meta and the like unfortunately, but it absolutely works.

Nextgrid

14 days ago

Can != will.

> It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe

Yeah, like every single cookie banner out there not actually being compliant. A regulation can't be considered to be meaningfully enforced when every single storefront openly breaches it in total impunity for years.

reedciccio

14 days ago

Yeah... Ask Schrems about the hefty fines and all that pretty things bright to Europeans by the GDPR. Come on! The GDPR is at best a pretty face to a rotten nothing-burger.

13 days ago

That's fair. By feel-good I meant, passing something without trying to see how this would be the reaction. Just put a tiny bit more thought into the edge cases for exploitation. Don't rush it for the moral victory, have cake and eat it too.

schubidubiduba

14 days ago

That is not the case here. The legislation has been drafted with all of this in mind, and will force Meta to continually improve until the feature is like it should be.

Without Trump making a huge fuss everytime US companies have to do something that can hurt their monopolies, we'd probably already be there

InsideOutSanta

14 days ago

Yep, 100% malicious compliance on Meta's part. I hope they get punished for this.

mlrtime

13 days ago

How so exactly? They can say they are keeping conversations secure from 3rd parties.

sagarm

urbandw311er

13 days ago

> any BirdyChat user

And how many of these are there? Anyone?

zoobab

13 days ago

"opt-in"

FAIL

raverbashing

13 days ago

> as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side

Chatting with anyone has always been opt in from the point of the receiver, so I don't get your point?

13 days ago

  > old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number.

Old telephone lines most certainly disclosed additional information about you. Who you contacted, when, how often.

Did you call that drug dealer every Tuesday evening? Looks suspicious. Did that criminal call you the day before he robbed a store not far from your home? Looks suspicious. Do you call Pakistan twice a week? Looks suspicious. Have you ever called a suicide prevention hotline? A bank other than your own? A mosque? An independent political party?

Your POTS phone was always revealing information.

lxgr

14 days ago

> whataspp discloses name, picture, status

Only to who you choose to make it available to. And if you choose “everybody”, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect this to mean “everybody not using third-party software”?

dmitrygr

14 days ago

Because until today that IS what it meant! Are you claiming that "pray i do not change the deal further" is a sane approach?

lxgr

14 days ago

I just don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation of a telecommunications tool, so yeah, I think it’s a fair change well within the norms and expectations of an instant messenger.

You should get to control how/ to whom your data is distributed, but also requiring these recipients to only use software and services of your choosing seems excessive. Platform lock-in at this point seems like the much greater harm.

I could see the case for a small indicator in the contact details that they’re using a third-party client, but anything more (green bubbles?) would be counterproductive.

dmitrygr

14 days ago

i did not ask for green bubbles, nor did whatsapp implement that. they let me opt-in to communicate with questionable clients and i am here for it.

jodrellblank

13 days ago

mlrtime

13 days ago

Yes, and you used to have to pay for it! Not only was it opt-in, there was a charge.

direwolf20

13 days ago

Several people have scraped every possible phone number from WhatsApp so they know your name, picture, and status if they want it.

mlrtime

13 days ago

So, that doesn't mean we give it away freely because someone was malicious. That makes no sense.

direwolf20

13 days ago

It's already given away freely. Anyone who has WhatsApp can add you as a contact and see this information.

If you are bored and have a computer, you can add every possible phone number as a contact. Not many people do that, but some did.

my_throwaway23

14 days ago

While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger.

I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

thebiblelover7

14 days ago

How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?

my_throwaway23

13 days ago

I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.

The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.

Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.

There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

https://github.com/mautrix/meta

zufallsheld

13 days ago

With this project (https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/), setting up the bridges gets a lot easier. After the initial setup, upgrading the bridges is painless.

wolvoleo

13 days ago

Yes but element/matrix aren't going to work with WhatsApp on offering compatibility. They have reasons for that, most of them good ones but I doubt that video is coming.

DanOpcode

13 days ago

Would be interesting to hear how it works what you have built.

Edit: Saw your other comment now.

my_throwaway23

13 days ago

Frankly I didn't "build" anything. It was mostly just a case of setting up the docker scripts, make sure the volumes have proper permissions and the configuration is sane. The configuration though, I'll take all the credit in the world for wading through, haha. These are not software with opinions included.

jeena

0xDEAFBEAD

13 days ago

> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well

The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.

>This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.

When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".

hsbauauvhabzb

13 days ago

No, their statement was ‘if another country gets it, I should get it too’. That’s not the same as ‘I long for the privacy benefits offered to Europeans and actively write to my government representatives to request it’. It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.

At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.

0xDEAFBEAD

13 days ago

"X should do Y" is common phrasing Americans use to talk about US public policy.

>It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.

It was once believed that privacy is a right that all humans share, and should be advanced for everyone. Modern scholars understand that this view is mistaken. Privacy is a privilege (your word, not mine!) that Europeans earned through their refined culture and discernment. Us Americans will need to catch up in terms of ancient ruins, cheese, and multilingualism in order to earn the the same privilege that Europe has by birthright =)

13 days ago

The bodies in charge of the EU governance, probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutions_of_the_European_U...

Commision [executive], Council (of Ministers/of the EU) [legislative] and Parliament [legislative] are the three most significant in terms of doing/looking like what any sovereign country government would.

altern8

13 days ago

Not sure, Europe isn't a country.

There's the EU, but members of the EU have their own governments.

I can't figure out why people keep getting confused. Turkey and Russia are in Europe, but not in the EU, for instance.

wswin

14 days ago

Let's not pretend they would do this if the tech monopolies were european.

lxgr

14 days ago

Yes, the EU would never dare to regulate European companies, for example require banks to offer free and instant person-to-person money transfers or mobile phone operators to offer data roaming at domestic rates.

user

14 days ago

[deleted]

seec

13 days ago

The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks. They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free.

SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).

Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.

It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.

wolvoleo

13 days ago

SEPA was a pain for us citizens anyway because now we have to use huge long account numbers even locally within the same country. I never understood why that had to be the case, just leave that for international transfers.

seec

12 days ago

Well, that's because with the EU there is a law to allow any citizen from any participating country to receive a salary/payment. to any EU-based bank.

So you do need SEPA normalization; otherwise that can't work. It's hardly a problem, and the fact that it required a regulation just shows how ineffective governments are in practice.

Fintech banks came up with an easier-to-use, more efficient, and more convenient system in less time than it took them to do this. And they manage to be cheaper.

The problem with banks is entirely regulation related; they are established players, working with/for the government, and basically get rewarded for stealing. Once I had a problem with my legacy bank, who robbed me of over 1k euros because they were generating 150-euro letters to tell me they refused a government tax debit for a lack of provision (mind you, the rejected amount was 50 euros, less than a third of their fee for rejecting it).

As far as I'm concerned, banks are legal criminals, enabled by the even bigger criminals running governments.

lxgr

12 days ago

Because the entire point of the EU is to make transactions across member states as easy as domestic ones, and mandating support for 27 or so bank account formats in all contexts where they're collected sounds like a nightmare.

Also, how much longer are they really than legacy national standard ones? In the countries I'm familiar with, they've added exactly four characters: The country code in positions 1-2 and the robust, standardized check digits in position 3 and 4.

13 days ago

I don't know, ask iMessage, Google messages, and, ironically, whatsapp.

hasel

12 days ago

it lives on the user’s phone?

Etheryte

12 days ago

This is not the case for any modern chat app. When you send a message to someone, it isn't delivered peer to peer straight to your recipient. The message goes from you to the service provider's server from where delivery is attempted whenever that message is processed. Your recipient might be offline, out of cell service, phone turned off, or etc and the central server takes care of that problem. Similarly when you log in to the chat service on the web, on your phone, on a new device etc, the messages need to be synced to you from somewhere, and that's again the service provider's central server. All messaging services do this. These days, some encrypt your messages, but not even remotely all.

aduwah

14 days ago

I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy.

Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.

Just as good on Windows, honestly. I miss that little bird.

rw_grim

13 days ago

You all know that we're still around and have been working on the next major release for quite a while now right?

You might be interested in our state of the bird posts... https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird

scroy

13 days ago

Nice. I think I left around the time gchat dropped XMPP support. Is google chat supported to any extent these days?

rw_grim

12 days ago

Kind of.. Getting a login cookie is difficult, but doable-ish https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-googlechat

swiftcoder

13 days ago

> this premise makes me feel iffy. Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging?

I think the pitch here is exactly the opposite of that? Many businesses in the EU already use WhatsApp for customer contact - this lets you separate your business communications from the app you use for personal messaging

zahirbmirza

14 days ago

From their page

"Built for better conversations Reach people with their email, not their phone number. Designed for focused, meaningful exchanges between managers, builders, and collaborators."

Is it using email protocols to send messages or is it using email addresses as a proxy for usernames?

The claim of a drive for better conversations is not really that accurate because better conversations rely on a more universally used app/system than presently exists. Ie, a replacement that would have to grow internationally extraordinarily quickly.

Apple figured that out... iMessage was basically a cheat code to a vast userbase almost instantly. What Apple didn't figure, however, was that iMessage's green/blue thingy that went on for so long didn't really give android/sms users fomo, but really, it just created an unneeded communication barrier. Such barriers are the exact opposite of what is needed for a communication platform to be excellent. Unfortunately, decisions counter to what may be perceived as income generating are difficult to reverse.

These sorts of apps may not be revolutionary enough I fear. I would love to adopt something like this, but Meta continue to make too many billions to let their monopoly on human communication management to be taken away that easily.

bruce343434

14 days ago

Never heard of this before. Why would I use this? I am assuming the messages are not actually encrypted, because on their own privacy page they state that they "process" messages and attachments sent through birdychat. So are they processing the raw unencrypted data on their servers or what?

From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".

https://www.birdy.chat/privacy

rippeltippel

13 days ago

It is very possible that they process messages in the client app, before sending them.

WhatsApp does the same: have you noticed how the photos you receive have a debatable quality? Presumably (and hopefully) the sender's app downscaled them before e2e encryption.

bruce343434

13 days ago

From this it seems that whatsapp interop requires you to pass a url of the media, not the actual encrypted media. Aside from TLS, I'm not sure what encryption you get for attachments

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

You just need to enable "HD videos & photos" option in the WhatsApp settings and then the pictures and movies sent via the app have a much higher quality.

Snoozus

13 days ago

On the main page it states clearly that messages are e2e encrypted. So all they can collect is metadata.

colinprince

14 days ago

RGBCube

9 days ago

Agreed, it's not intuitive at all, but at least it's there...

marcandre

13 days ago

Or from any browser: https://wa.me/<phone number, just the digits, starting with country code>

j1elo

13 days ago

In fact that's simply what the app does. It's just a handy way to have it on the phone as a shortcut and not having to remember the details of how to do it. Although with the sibling comments about Whatsapp itself allowing to do all this, the helper app seems less useful now.

poisonborz

14 days ago

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

input_sh

14 days ago

Correct! This is just Meta doing malicious compliance by being "compatible" with companies with no actual product, three-months old waitlist, no actual users within the EU, and nobody to push back on WhatsApp's definition of interoperability. Then when some real product tries to actually become interoperable down-the-line, Meta's gonna be like "well these two did it just fine according to this backwards implementation, why can't you?"

They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.

Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html

> Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.

14 days ago

>> including a pioneering silencing technology that will allow users to speak privately in public, with voice communication that only your device can hear.

Does anyone else think this sounds beyond ridiculous?

londons_explore

14 days ago

> voice communication that only your device can hear.

This is fairly straightforward - you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech (ie. random overlapping syllables in the speaker's voice). Take a recording then subtract the random syllables.

Only your device can do the subtraction, because only your device knows the waveform it transmitted.

Obviously in a room with lots of reverb this will be a bit harder, since you will also need to subtract the reflection of what was transmitted with a room profile and deal with the phone moving in the room, but it sounds far from impossible.

wizzwizz4

14 days ago

Countermeasure: set up four microphones some distance apart, use autocorrelation to pinpoint the sound sources, and then isolate them, recovering the "masked" speech. The countercountermeasure would be to fully surround your mouth and vocal tract with an active noise cancelling system and then produce noise (to push whatever little sound gets through far below the noise floor: the signal is unpredictable enough that you can't use averaging techniques to recover it). The countercountercountermeasure would be to use a camera in the radio band to look at the vocal tract directly, using the phone as a light source, and recover the phonemes that way. The countercountercountercountermeasure would be to construct an isolated box… at which point you're no longer having a voice call in public: you have a portable privacy booth.

zimpenfish

14 days ago

> you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech

Surely this only works if you're using the phone as a speakerphone (and are therefore almost certainly being an arsehole in public[0])?

[0] Because if it was an actual speakerphone situation, hiding your voice would be stupid.

huflungdung

14 days ago

[dead]

kubb

14 days ago

I see a second round of legislation might be needed. They'll get it right eventually.

input_sh

I don't know — why do businesses outside Europe care about GDPR compliance at all? They could just track Europeans all they want to, without any cookie banners.

xmcp123

13 days ago

Tbh most do. It makes sense only for big companies with a multinational presence.

But admitting you are subject to the laws of a country/entity is one thing, sending them your books (when your company is not based there) is kind of on a different level

14 days ago

> keep all the revenue

Which revenue? Whatsapp is for free, those 3.3 billion people use it for free, the revenue is the reselling of user data and showing them ads. Which they would do less with a 3rd party client, and as such Meta fights it tooth and nail.

> You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app

It might surprise you but people build apps just for fun, free and open source for others to use, just to make the world better. Which really would be in this case, that's also the intention of this law.

londons_explore

14 days ago

> because it's obviously against their interests.

Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.

Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"

nottorp

14 days ago

Well they lost me at waitlist.

drnick1

14 days ago

It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.

uyzstvqs

13 days ago

14 days ago

I'd also like to know what "based in the EEA" means:

> For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.

Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

EEA = European Economic Area. It includes a few other countries such as Switzerland, Norway and about two more which I forgot.

kykat

14 days ago

The company of the website appears to be based in Riga, Latvia https://company.lursoft.lv/en/fyello-productivity/4020345542...

altern8

14 days ago

I thought the same thing.

I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?

pbhjpbhj

14 days ago

Surely it's very similar, companies can't - AFAIK - be registered in USA, they're registered in a state. USA's States have different tax and legislative climates, just like EU states do.

LelouBil

13 days ago

There is actually a "European company" structure.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/devel...

Most notably, Airbus is an "European company".

palata

14 days ago

It's not. Part of Russia is in Europe. The geographical limit between Europe and Asia is not well defined.

I think it would be similar to saying "First American chat app that...", which would be ambiguous?

rippeltippel

13 days ago

It Is fair to say that "Europe" is a proxy for "European Union", like "America" is usually understood as "United States of America", without any precise geographic connotation.

Their service operates in the European Economic Area, which includes more countries than the EU and is therefore closer to the European geographic surface.

palata

13 days ago

I think that "America" actually means "the USA". "American", on the other hand...

altern8

14 days ago

Sure, but the U.S. are a single country, while Europe is many different countries that are completely different.

I'm in Poland and can drive 2 hours and stop understanding what people are saying to me (in German and Czech).

That was my point.

bojan

14 days ago

> while Europe is many different countries that are completely different.

I've always found this a weird take. European (EU) countries are more similar to each other than any country outside of Europe is to any European country.

In your example, if you drive two hours to Germany or Czechia, your car will still be insured, all your bank cards will still work, the price of your mobile phone service stays the same, you'll have a good idea how health and employment systems work, and the chances are you'll be able to talk to people in English.

It remains true that the barriers the businesses face are higher, but that's not what your example was about.

SahAssar

13 days ago

> I've always found this a weird take. European (EU) countries are more similar to each other than any country outside of Europe is to any European country.

You think finland and malta are more similar to each other than sweden and norway?

retired

14 days ago

14 days ago

As my comment implied, there is in some places, but the regulations aren't uniform. Also, the person I responded to mentioned supermarket products. I was asking legitimate questions & was hoping to get an informed response.

usr1106

13 days ago

I agree, made in Europe, does not give enogh information. Their T&C gives the details: They are from Latvia.

I dare to claim: A majority of EU citizens know really nothing about Latvia.

timeon

14 days ago

Reminds me eurosky.social they have on page:

augusto-moura

14 days ago

I think you can do it on pure Androids that can have more than 1 SIM card, you need to have an Android profile for each and have both sim cards in the same phone.

direwolf20

13 days ago

Nexus used to support unlimited profiles for the whole phone including every app, Samsung phones don't.

wolvoleo

13 days ago

You can do this on many Android phones. You can have up to 5 WhatsApp numbers on a Samsung phone.

Samsung has dual messenger, so you can have 2 instances by default. Then you can open up a work profile and have another two. Then install WhatsApp in a secure folder and have another one (dual messenger seems blocked in secure folder so just one)

globular-toast

13 days ago

Why would I use this closed source program instead of another closed source program. I don't trust some random company from Latvia any more than I trust Meta. We need this interop to be available for free software clients. I want something like Pidgin.

rw_grim

13 days ago

Well you can have it now... https://github.com/hoehermann/purple-gowhatsapp/

globular-toast

12 days ago

What's the catch?

rw_grim

12 days ago

See the known issues on the page I linked? https://github.com/hoehermann/purple-gowhatsapp/blob/whatsme...

14 days ago

Ok then, Apple's Messages is interoperable, as you can communicate via SMS with its users.

snowmobile

12 days ago

You can communicate via SMS with users of WhatsApp too genius. Do you think it's encrypted in any way?

cheema33

14 days ago

> But iMessage is already open?

How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system? My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only.

TZubiri

14 days ago

>How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system?

You can send an SMS.

>My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only

No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol, that you can only use on Apple devices. But from non Apple devices you can use the standard SMS.

cheema33

13 days ago

>> My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only

> No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol...

Earlier you asked: "But iMessage is already open?"

Now you are saying that iMessage uses "Apple's proprietary protocol". I hope now you understand that when people say that Apple iMessage is not open, they are not talking about the SMS protocol that Apple does not own.

nottorp

14 days ago

14 days ago

ExoticPearTree

13 days ago

> yet-another-ICE-killing incident today

Man with a gun approaches law enforcement during an operation. What do you think was going to happen? They would give him flowers?

How about you try the same thing with the police during a stop or a chase and see if the results are different.

This is really not the place for biased political discourse that has nothing to do with the topic of the conversation.

amelius

14 days ago

Birdy has this Twittery sound to it.

thwg

14 days ago

When a smaller network tries to be interoperable with a larger network, the larger network almost always eats up the smaller one. This is how XMPP was killed by Gtalk, if any of you are old enough to remember.

oblio

14 days ago

Gtalk did not kill XMPP. Very few people were using XMPP before Gtalk, most people were using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and other proprietary protocols. Gtalk supported XMPP to gain traction as a more open messenger and possibly because they implemented the original version on top of XMPP to get it out the door faster.

Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.

I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.

B1FIDO

14 days ago

Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd. I recall several colleagues who established Jabber addresses and advertised them, sometimes as their only IM address.

XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.

oblio

13 days ago

> Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd.

Yeah, just like today, all 4 of them.

Gtalk put XMPP briefly in the spotlight, but for the masses, XMPP never really lived. It was a niche protocol with very niche usage. Just like Mastodon today.

t00

14 days ago

Closed, iOS only, invite only. Thanks.

Hackbraten

14 days ago

Thanks for the heads up. You saved me some frustration and disappointment.

My_Name

14 days ago

Let me know when I can link it to the hundred whatsapp groups other people have added me to, so I can remove the stain of zuckerberg from as much of my life as possible.

velocity3230

13 days ago

Install a Matrix client and run a WhatsApp bridge and you can.

Is it trivial? No.

Is it possible? Yes, I do it.

13 days ago

It’s already possible to make WhatsApp bots, if the API was official they could moderate it better if anything so I don’t see how it would help with spam

direwolf20

13 days ago

All phone and internet services in the EU are connected to your personal identity document, similar to China. If you send spam, the police come to your house.

dmitrygr

10 days ago

And this why there is no phone spam… oh wait…

velocity3230

13 days ago

In a roundabout way, you can.

Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.

greentea23

13 days ago

The only thing that matter is whether you trust the app or not.

- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).

- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.

> You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?

Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.

skippyboxedhero

14 days ago

I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe.

The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.

jeroenhd

13 days ago

> Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU

The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.

I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.

That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.

oblio

14 days ago

> region whose government is hostile to privacy

Which government?

skippyboxedhero

14 days ago

EU. I don't think it is any better at the national level however.

oblio

13 days ago

The EU is not a government. It's a loose economic confederation. And national European governments vary wildly in their positions on this.

skippyboxedhero

13 days ago

It isn't an "economic confederation". It has a parliament, an executive, a judiciary, and a civil service. I would read the wiki page on the European Union.

oblio

12 days ago

14 days ago

Yep. And apparently the answer is they both use the Signal Protocol.

No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

Nextgrid

14 days ago

Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format? I think now they have some bullshit proprietary paid cloud storage solution (why not let me use the cloud I already pay for?), but for years they haven't had any solution for iOS at all.

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a target device to export my data.

I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

B-Con

14 days ago

Any time an app has bizarre functionality gap on iOS, I assume it's because of Apple's anti-consumer bullshit app restrictions.

No idea if that's actually what's going on, but Apple thinks of their devices as appliances and hates when apps offer pro-customer features.

pseudalopex

14 days ago

No. The Signal developers opted out of iOS's backup and export features.

fph

13 days ago

I have no idea why, but I would bet it's because it was sending stuff to Apple unencrypted.

Nextgrid

13 days ago

It's because Signal has some unhealthy obsession with "security" and does not want to recipient of the communication to ever be able to export messages in plain text.

jolmg

13 days ago

> Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format?

> I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

That doesn't fix anything, does it?

Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.

The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".

Nextgrid

13 days ago

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...

> backup is still marked as beta

Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.

ivm

13 days ago

But we're talking about mass adoption, not Hacker News users' preferences. Signal simply doesn't offer anything attractive to most people.

As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.

jeroenhd

13 days ago

Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do.

Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.

ivm

13 days ago

Yeah, and to overcome the network effect, you need something compelling enough to justify the effort in the first place. I have hundreds of local contacts on WhatsApp, many of whom have joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits (for example, a local firefighter feed is shared through a channel there). But I only have about 20 contacts on Signal, even IT guys aren’t there. It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.

xpe

12 days ago

> It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.

Why not this: what is _best_ for a person once they fully educate themself?

If it were your friend, what would you recommend, once you understood the differences? I just reassessed and Signal wins.

maqp

13 days ago

>joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits

Sorry, social media masquerading as a secure messaging app isn't a secure messaging app.

ivm

13 days ago

I bet nobody joins Telegram because of its perceived security, it's a content platform.

maqp

13 days ago

14 days ago

* Not end-to-end encrypted by default.

* No end-to-end encryption for groups.

* No end-to-end encryption for desktop meaning normal use when working on computer requires you and your friends to constantly whip out phone to send 1:1 secret chats. Nobody wants to do that so they revert to non-E2EE chats.

* Terrible track record with end-to-end encryption deployment from AES-IGE to IND-CCA vulnerabilities

* CEO pretends to be exiled from Russia but in secretly visits Russia over SIXTY times in 10 years https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/

* Zero metadata protection from server

* Open source, but it's meaningless as it only confirms the client doesn't protect content or metadata from the server.

palata

14 days ago

I think Signal is a better alternative, even though it's US made. It's open source.

bni

14 days ago

14 days ago

We had XMPP, and even Google Chat used that in the early days.

It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.

petre

14 days ago

Google Chat used XMPP to build an user base and then cut it off from the Jabber network. That's when I stopped using it. Or was it when it got integrated into Gmail? Then they rebranded it and binned each iteration several times.

palata

14 days ago

Similar to Slack and IRC? I guess that's just part of the enshittification process.

Nextgrid

14 days ago

The issue isn't closed vs open but business models. The reason most services don't support third-party clients is that their business model is based on advertising (aka wasting the user's time) and a third-party client would reduce said wasted time.

A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.

kelnos

14 days ago

Right. Unfortunately, people have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets, and prefer to pay with their time and attention (and ignore the fact that they're being psychologically manipulated into buying random products and services) than with actual cash.

I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.

This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.

wolvoleo

13 days ago

The thing is, it wouldn't have to cost a lot.

Signal spends $50M a year for about 100 million active users. That's 50 cents per user per year. Or 4 cents per month :) Even with a bit of profit it's still nonsense money.

And 6 million of that alone is going up in sms validation because they insist on using mobile numbers as an identifier. They could save that if they used other methods.

otterley

14 days ago

The problem is that there's not much of a market for an ecosystem of commercial chat clients that use open standards underneath. It's not like it hasn't been tried. What ultimately ends up happening is the market becomes a race to the bottom, chat clients become a commodity product, and innovation ceases. It's essentially what happened with Web browsers and why we don't have a particularly robust for-profit market in that space.

14 days ago

I understand, but in this specific arena, because of the network effect, interoperability is important so you can hope to make a competitive product.

More in general,standard protocols are important but they don't necessarily avoid lock-in.

For example, imagine a Dropbox equivalent with a public API specification.

At some point you want to leave. You are ready to use Postman or even curl and download everything to upload it somewhere else... but download is capped at 10 files/day per user. And you uploaded 100,000 files over years.

The API is public but good luck leaving with all your files!

In other words, standard protocols help avoiding client lock-in, but when the value is on the server side (data,...), they are not enough.

PEe9bB7D

14 days ago

Matrix is getting traction though...

Nextgrid

14 days ago

Matrix is a lost cause. The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation. I was hopeful for it at first but at some point you have to be realistic.

zenmac

14 days ago

While I agree with you, and there should more diverse members than just the people from Element.

What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app.

And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make their own apps. Maybe it should be something the EU should put some more resource into it?

palata

14 days ago

> What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking

Last time I checked, the Matrix servers had access to a lot of metadata. Did they fundamentally change it?

velocity3230

13 days ago

Encrypted metadata is in the works.

hermanzegerman

14 days ago

German Healthcare will also be using Matrix

vpShane

14 days ago

It was the invite floods of what was probably CP and cat torture that made me uninstall it and never look back.

No thanks on that. I don't have time or energy for these things.

kelnos

14 days ago

Is it? My experience with it has been middling at best, and I communicate with exactly zero people through Matrix outside of the context of open source projects.

14 days ago

ICQ was not only proprietary, but it was centralized and server-based, even though the messaging part was peer-to-peer.

Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.

So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!

Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.

But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.

14 days ago

damnn

user

14 days ago

[deleted]

phishingpharao

14 days ago

[dead]

morphle

14 days ago

Warning! Badly broken user interface, I wouldn't trust these programmers to get the end-to-end encryption right.

14 days ago

The problem I have with names like BirdyChat is they're not easy to remember and even less easy to explain to someone whose first language isn't English. Like yeah, we know it's "Chat" and "Bird" combined and all but to a lot of people it's just "Bdytsch something". Compare that to Twitter which is relatively easy to pronounce and remember.

Forgejo is even worse in that regard. I live in Europe, speak 5 languages, and still have to think to remember the proper pronunciation every time.

14 days ago

Somehow I feel like GIMP's lack of popularity has more to do with its reputation for having a horrendous and impenetrable interface than its name.

At one point in the recent past there was a fork of GIMP named "Glimpse," yet weren't a sudden influx of users who were waiting for a more polite name.

altern8

14 days ago

I would say both.

BUT, lack of users might just be that it's too late, now. People use web-based tools like Figma, I wouldn't think a lot of people are looking for a Photoshop alternative.

LexiMax

13 days ago

altern8

14 days ago

It just sounds—let's say—too playful.

Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.

That might just be me, not sure.

Does WhatsApp charge money for this? If not, why would a business use their API? They could simply create an app to directly talk to their customers, or am I missing something?