As others have mentioned increasingly small businesses (like my outdoor exercise class) and loose communities (like my child's school year parent's group) rely on WhatsApp. persuading these loose connections to move away from WhatsApp for one's own benefit is almost impossible.
Sacrificing access to these social amenities on the altar of incremental privacy invasion and power transfer to an unaccountable basically malign organisation is hard to stomach. And rather inconsequential taken in isolation.
What technical and legislative means might be effective in limiting the network effect around group chats? For example requiring in law that groups be accessible to an open federated hub and spoke messaging protocol to allow messages to flow from syndicated groups established on other systems (like matrix or signal or whatever) to WhatsApp groups.
What technical and legal prior art is there here? I would be interested to hear some ideas.
I feel like the internet, and the digital activities that happen on it, are this generation’s railroads, power, and telecommunications in the 18th and 19th century. They started as wild free-for-alls and evolved into regulated and stable markets with consumer protections, standardization, right to access, etc., usually after corrupt and unethical monopolies got out of hand and showed the importance of the service as a basic utility needed for a functioning country, and the need to protect it.
I guess that's part of the plan, give it for free and make it indispensable and then reap the rewards. Feels like a drug operation. :(
It might be enough to use many different messaging apps in parallel. This enabled competition and a smooth transition between them. For example, I tend to slowly move from WhatsApp to Telegram as more new groups I join are created in Telegram while old groups in WhatsApp tend to get abandoned. Also, I often access these groups through opera via their API and not the native apps. This is a natural development in a market where people use multiple apps in parallel: aggregators emerge and with that, the power shifts to them. That’s a good thing as it makes it easier to transition from one solution to the other.
What could be done legally to help this development is requiring services to offer open APIs to reduce the lock-in.
Which Opera API are you talking about?
Isn't it just a wrapper for https://web.whatsapp.com/ ? I wouldn't call that an "API"
Having different apps is probably a step forward indeed. But (as far as I understand) just having WhatsApp installed on my phone allows them to keep an eye on my contact list. That sounds quite despicable to me.
Isn't Signal better than Telegram?
Better in which terms? UX/Usability? Privacy/anonymity? Reliability? Reliability on never losing contacts/data? User-proof? As in: non-tech people will have it working well without tinkering, and they will not lose their data because they didn't to X procedure?
If i would join your group only to realize i would get no infos without an whatsapp acc i would not come back.
That's easy to say when you live in a country where it's not a social norm (I assume you do)