SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
Signal will soon be your one stop solution for all your chat apps
Fixed that for you.
* Except SMS
Why is this being presented as “whatsapp will be the one and only” instead of “whatsapp won’t be the only option”? The DMA will users to install nearly any chat app and chat with users from another chat app.
Where are you getting “the one and only” from? Are you misinterpreting “one-stop solution”?
What are you interpreting “one-stop solution” as?
Not a fucking chance!
Signal interoperability
I support it but this doesn’t sound legit
No it won’t.
My sister was angered when I quit whatsapp (and facebook), asking me reasons why and if it was because I didn’t like her. Told her I like my privacy. Haven’t heard of her and a lot of other family since who only like to communicate through social media. Good.
I like SMS and Signal, only people that care for me are using that because I asked them to.
I’m there with you on the ideals, after all here I am on Lemmy (and mastodon fwiw) with Reddit and TwitterX deleted.
But, everybody I am close to in everyday life is a normie for lack of a better term. I don’t have to use Facebook regularly, for example, but there is a practical value to just having it available and checking notifications from time to time.
Kind of like how I’m looking through some code in Linux at work today, but it’s running in a VM on my Microsoft/O365 equipped PC. Much like with Facebook, factors outside my control necessitate using it, so I accept it without stressing myself.
I’m not trying to argue or convince you to change your ways though! FLOSS and privacy need awareness and advocacy, and therefore need strong outspoken supporters!
The fact that iMessage got the exemptions underpins the entire act. I would any day switch to Signal, if there is 1:1 interoperability b/w the platforms.
iMessage is not considered a gatekeeper in Europe because pretty much nobody uses it. That’s why it’s extempted.
It’s because there’s not enough people in the EU actually using it.
@TheMadnessKing @floppy in Europe for most people iMessage is just the SMS app. Even though it pisses me off that Apple got away with it, having WhatsApp to comply with this is just huge. Everyone here uses WhatsApp, and now I won’t be forced to leave Signal anymore.
They got a exception because npbody uses that insecure garbage here, everyone uses Whatsapp tho so this makes a lot of sense!
Apple just claimed an exception. It’s still up to the EU to determine whether it is actually exempt or not.
Nobody here uses it though
Yes. Thankfully.
deleted by creator
Cool so I can decide to use Signal for privacy reasons and if the other party uses WhatsApp all my chats with them are read by Meta? What is the point?
No, it’s still E2EE. Meta can’t read it as far as anyone knows. Meta will know that the other person has you in their contacts (they already know this) and that they are messaging you, that’s it.
Meta writes the software that runs on the other end, and it’s closed source. Therefore for all we know, the message is end-to-end encrypted, and the moment it is decrypted on the other end Meta can send it back to their servers or use it for advertising. Unless the client at the end is open source and audited, E2E doesn’t mean much imo
Well, I think you’re the only one who thinks that E2EE doesn’t mean much.
No I think you’ve missed their point. E2EE is end-to-end encryption, as in the message can’t be intercepted in the middle but it’s unencrypted at the end so you can read it. Because the WhatsApp app is closed-source you don’t know that it doesn’t immediately read the message and send the content to Facebook. It probably doesn’t, but it could! E2EE itself means that some third party can’t read your message in transit, though to be fair closed-source again means we just have to trust Facebook when they say WhatsApp uses E2EE.
That’s not it. It’s E2EE but Meta gathers all the metadata from Whatsapp including who you contact, when, where, how large the messages are, what times you’re online and for how long, phone numbers, names etc. That’s plenty of info to create a profile on users and their connections with each other, as is Facebook’s MO.
Odd way to spell Matrix.
Eww no get that trash outta here
Whoa this is bonkers! Would be great if all apps supported RCS as a fallback
RCS needs phone operators, it does not have any publicly available server or client implementation and is already obsolete by other Internet based protocols. And noone uses it besides Google that has bad reputation for keeping chat apps alive.
Genuinely interested:
Made obsolete by what protocols?
I can’t wait for signal/session/simplex to be whatsapp compatible, but I’m not sure they can provided the e2ee gurantees since whatsapp is closed source.
deleted by creator
I fear that Signal won’t implement cross compatibility for WhatsApp since they already said that they are not a fan of potentially giving up E2EE to get it to work. And I can understand that but I still really would like to have the cross compatibility.
And this is where I wonder, how long until Matrix servers preemptively defederate from WhatsApp?
Probably won’t. WhatsApp is already huge. Threads was a new platform with artificially inflated user numbers.
I will finally be able to replace fucking SMS with a few people that simply won’t switch to Signal, I simply won’t use Whatsapp and that did cause some security issues till now!
Fuck that, fuck them they belong in the digital bin. I don’t want WhatsApp to be able to connect to Signal or anything else. Sounds like a gigantic security risk.
This is such a silly take. If you will talk to signal users, you won’t interact with this tech. If you want to talk to whatsapp users, right now yo need to have the app which is much worse!
“I don’t want these Signal encrypted Matrix protocol messages on my Signal encrypted Matrix protocol messaging app, it’s a gigantic security risk”
I setup my own matrix instance and ran a few bridges on it, so I don’t need WhatsApp thanks
How does that solve communication with people that are exclusively on whatsapp?
deleted by creator
I never used matrix or bridges so I don’t know what that means. Do you still need a whatsapp account? What do people using whatsapp see when you send messages to them? How does encryption work if you bridge something like signal, if there are “bridges” for other apps out there? Can i bridge viber on my phone and avoid the annoying ads that way, how reliable is it?
deleted by creator
You login to your account with the bridge, so the bridge can pretend to be you.
I’ve been reading a bit about it, it sounds good in theory but I’m not sure most people are willing to selfhost (since otherwise you’re just trusting another party with your data anyway) and maintain all these bridges for something as crucial as day to day communication that should be stable. It kinda wraps it all in a single point of failure as well.
Still seems like the EU legislation could be a better option, if I can just interface with everything through signal or telegram.
Matrix is FOSS, Synapse (Matrix server) is FOSS, bridges are FOSS. The only thing stopping most people is a server that can run 24/7
Bridges?
You can set up bridges to link to your other messengers. Then you will only need Matrix to be able to reply to everyone.
How
