Technology

58159 readers

3743 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

152

WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps (www.wired.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

WhatsApp will soon make it possible to chat with people who use other messaging apps. It's revealed some more details on how that will work.

— Apps will need to sign an agreement with Meta, then connect to its servers.

— Meta wants people to use the Signal Protocol, but also says other encryption protocols can be used if they can meet WhatsApp's standards

— WhatsApp has been testing with Matrix in recent months, although nothing is agreed yet. Swiss app Threema says it won't become interoperable

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

But what would be the point?

I swear, people have all these weird conspiracy theories around supposed "EEE" tactics, but Whatsapp already dominates the instant messaging space. It's pretty much a monopoly. The simplest solution to continue to dominate basically the entire market is do nothing.

Somebody explain to me how literally having the entire market to themselves in exclusive is somehow worse than any interoperability at all. You can't tank the use rate lower than zero.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I feel there's some kind of miscommunication going on here.

Probably I'm not understanding what you are putting forward, but to be clear: They are not doing this because they want to. They are doing it because they are forced to do it by the DMA.
It's true that allegedly they were working on some kind of interoperability layer already. For years now. But no evidence of it being more than lip service to avoid being regulated has ever surfaced - as far as I know.

Which would have been in line with your "Do Nothing".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

It's not lip service if I can send messages and other people can receive them.

Again, the status quo is you can't do that. Hell, in the spectrum of being dragged into reasonableness by the EU kicking and screaming, Meta is orders of magnitude below Apple here.

I mean, we can debate the finer points of the implementation once it's live, but for now this is nothing but positive movement. If people got over rejecting cookies they can get over dismissing warnings regarding interoperability, and if they don't, the same regulators have a history of re-spanking unruly malicious compliers.