I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Somebody please tell me what's wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there's no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn't understand the difference.
Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS...
You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.
Source: https://www.derstandard.at/story/1747665/deutschland-hohe-preise-fuer-mms-verderben-das-geschaeft
Don't have friends. Problem solved.
And other countries don't understand why US users stick to txt/mms.... Its convenient and built into the phone so everyone has it.
I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just... boring.
Matrix with bridges can help consolidate them. Some managed versions exist like Beeper and Element. Been slowly moving to that. Will eventually self host.
Yeah... This 1000 times... It DOES bother me to install all that shit. What doesn't bother me? Installing a bridge on Matrix and having everything in one place. Hell I've even started adding matrix to my linux scripts. I get notifications about script status in dedicated spaces on my single chat window.
I'm literally SMS away from doing 100% of the chat clients I use for personal usage... And seriously debating on bridging teams for work usage.
I've even gotten my wife onboard. That, to me, speaks about how frustrated normal people are with having many different apps as well.
Element has bridges to some of the services
Your options are RCS, Signal, or Lemmy mentions. Or losing contact with me I guess but I'm irresistible
So.... proprietary data collecting thing owned by Google, service that requires phone number to sign up, or service that does not even pretend to be E2EE and (worse) routes chat traffic through multiple potentially-adversary-controlled servers on its way to you?
Reality check: nobody cares about you if you do not comply with societal "common denominator" norms.
As unfortunate and bullshit as that sounds, it will always hold true. This is the reason I have Whatsapp and Discord work profile sandboxed and highly restricted running through custom HOSTS ruleset + NetGuard. I concluded these are the 2 platforms needed to minmax information "freedom" and social compliance.
Beeper!
I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness
Let's just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern "chat" landscape is dismal.
What is the middle one?
Element. It's a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.
