> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
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.
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.
I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.
> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
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.
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.
Just opened my Whatsapp settings and "Third-party chat requests" is on by default (From the Netherlands). Although to actually receive messages you do have to activate this feature.
I understand my agreement with WhatsApp - i read it and all. I have no agreement with that other app. I do not know what they would do with my data. Until they give me a privacy policy and i approve it, they indeed should have none of my data. Opt-in is the correct solution.
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and
What a strange way to think about a telecommunications service. By the same logic, shouldn’t there be a privacy policy for regular old phone lines? Who knows which third parties are between you and the person on the other end!
And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…
Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. 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, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores
It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.
> 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
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
> 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".
Surely you are aware that WhatsApp is a product of a tiny US co. Meta? Funny how the world sans the US is so in love with it. Shouldn’t the EU be out on the streets boycotting it?
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.
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.
With ToS, we can assume that everything that is not laid down explicitly tends to err in favor of the company, not the user.
"we store all messages": they store everything and ther s no guarantee of processing, sharing or selling that data
"we store all messages encrypted end to end for sole the purposes of communication and can never access its contents" would provide many more guarantees.
This happens a lot on HN. I remember there was a court order for OpenAI to release ChatGPT chat history, and many of the comments were simply "why are they even storing chat history in the first place? ridiculous" as if that isn't a core feature of ChatGPT.
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.
Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion
The unfortunate problem with Pidgin is you don't have proper cross-platform E2EE chats, especially for groups. OTR is terribly outdated with its 1536-bit FFDH. These days the security margin sits at 2048-bit minimum, 3072-bit recommended. OMEMO might work but it's just not a standard. Good thing Signal made the whole thing just work.
Surely there must be someone capable of and willing to update OTR to support the latest PQC encryption protocols and ciphers. OTR is the only semi-trustable model of E2EE I have ever seen. Anything managed by the same platform managing the communication is dead in the water for me.
> 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
"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.
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".
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.
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
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.
Readit News
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
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.
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.
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
And how many of these are there? Anyone?
FAIL
Chatting with anyone has always been opt in from the point of the receiver, so I don't get your point?
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and
And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…
Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.
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.
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
Edit: Saw your other comment now.
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
> 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
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
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".
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.
> Messages, attachments and other materials that you send through BirdyChat to your contacts;
No thanks
"we store all messages": they store everything and ther s no guarantee of processing, sharing or selling that data
"we store all messages encrypted end to end for sole the purposes of communication and can never access its contents" would provide many more guarantees.
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.
Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion
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
"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.
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
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.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736050