I have not found any news article on this on a whim. Because my friends and family, I need to use Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Lite was a OK client - lightweight, no unnecessary features, etc., compared to the regular Messenger app.
Now I’m a little torn, having a Meta app on my phone is already bad, but having to downgrade to the bloated Messenger app? Not sure I will make a change. What are your thoughts?
Ever since Facebook forced the separate Messenger app, I’ve refused to install it. Instead, when I see a message notification, I pop into a browser, head to Facebook.com and push the desktop version. While it’s clunky, I’ve never had to download Messenger.
Separate messaging app was the best thing they ever did. I’ve not had Facebook installed since.
Same. This will change nothing for me. I refuse their bullshit.
You’re still using their shit, just in a very inconvenient way. In fact, you’re going to their site that contains targeted ads rather than using an ad free app. What a strange hill to die on.
I have exactly one group that insists on communicating this way. Which is why this isn’t a big inconvenience for me. Your point is well taken, but doesn’t really apply in my case. I’m not a user of the service, which is why it’s so easy for me to refuse to install it, and hopefully I can use this to pressure the group to move to discord or some other means of communication. But if not I will continue to use the desktop site rather than install an app.
I’m in the exact same position as you and take the same approach. It’s a hill I’m getting a mildly stubbed toe on.
I’d rather have a slight inconvenience of seeing their ads on their website for the few moments I’d need to send a message than having their spyware of an app tracking everything I do all day long.
Not only is that not possible on both Android and iPhone nowadays, that’s a myth that’s never been remotely proven.
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Yeah, none of that means they’re tracking everything you do all day long.
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Man, this is the single most ignorant comment I’ve seen regarding Facebook. You’ve never wondered how a company that offers a free product makes billions?
If that list didn’t have anything on it except “location”, I’d still say that you’re wrong about them not tracking you. How can you read all of the other things on that list and not realize that selling your data is how they make money?
https://mbasic.facebook.com/ still works. It’s missing some modern niceties, but usable. That’s what I use for occasional messages.
In my head, i read this URL as https://YaBasic.facebook.com
https://www.messenger.com/ also works (requires to be running as desktop version). Still not ideal but works.
Why? I mean it’s much better to have the messenger app without all the facebook BS.
Its very easy to disregard facebook in 2023, but Messenger is still one of the more prominent messaging app.
I hate to say this, but Facebook Messenger is one of the most fully featured messaging apps. It has its own internal messaging standard that offers iMessage like features between Facebook users, and it also is one of the better SMS apps out there.
I can see why they make it its own app, it’s supposed to replace other messaging apps.
Same here. I wish Disa messenger app was maintained as it was my one stop shop for a few messenger apps.
Is their messenger still a 150 MB monster that gets updated twice a day?
Yes, and they constantly change how parts of the UI work, most often getting more in the way of efficient actual messaging… It’s really bad.
They cut the size down to 30 MB on iOS in 2019, but they’re back to 110 since (on Android, it’s 60 MB).
EDIT: In terms of updates, they are pretty stable at one update a week on both systems.
I think the Facebook Lite app includes messaging too.
No… I disabled the auto updates.
I wish someone discontinued Meta
Too bad Threads hasn’t entered the Fediverse, things could’ve been easier.
I’ll die before I install Facebook Messenger
Same. Just have to hold out until the EU makes all messaging apps cross+operable and then I’ll be able to talk to everyone again.
Careful. They could be listening.
I hope they are.
Hey Facebook, eat a bag of dicks!
A whole bag of them!
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Everyone in my family 😞
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Again, who tf uses messenger?
The entire nation of Poland
Not me
Wait you’re not an entire nation are you?
I just like to be proud of improving digital space around me
In our country, texting (through the built-in Messenger app) is mostly done as an emergency measure, as most people here use Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp.
You’d rather be spied on by your carrier… Got it.
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Fair enough.
Personally, I don’t like using 30 year old technology to communicate. I avoid phone calls and I generally avoid SMS and it’s derivatives.
I work in IT and generally demand more from my messaging apps. I still avoid FB like the plague though.
Carrier can’t spy on you if iMessage and signal!
Which are both not SMS/texting. I know iMessage falls back to SMS if the number doesn’t have iMessage, which is where the carrier spying comes in.
Instead for iMessage, it’s Apple spying, and for signal it’s… Shrug
Ask them to go physically to your house if they ever need to tell you something urgent. If they refuse to, good riddance
Oh ya I’ll just tell my grandparents to drive 10-12 hours to get to the other side of the island every time they want to talk to me or see my face
@cnnrduncan @csolisr My grandparents are on Signal 🤷
Incredibly based grandparents
They all have phone numbers you can text and they don’t need to install another app or sign up for anything at least. But I understand when they prefer it and you have a fb account anyways.
Good luck sending photos or holding a video call with the scant 1100 bits provided by an SMS message…
RCS is our last hope…
AFAIK that unfortunately requires using Google Messages (or moving overseas)
I believe they’ve (Google) has been somewhat successful in convincing carriers / 3rd party OS devs like Samsung to start implementing RCS in their own messaging apps. There’s even a 3rd party app on iOS that can use it now.
Definitely not. Devs have been asking for an RCS API in Android for ages, and Google hasn’t added it.
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Over 3 billion users combined.
So, to answer your question: “Nearly everybody.”
That’s overly dramatic, we’re over 8 billion already… so it’s “Nearly half of everybody” 😜
Facebook is the main social media in Africa. It’s not a bommer thing there, everyone use it.
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Australians apparently. That’s what my cousins said as the explanation for why their family chat was on Facebook.
Messenger is the most popular messaging app in Australia by far. #2 is Apple/Facetime (which is about equal with WhatsApp in terms of market share) but there’s a huge gap between #1 and #2.
At least a billion people
Only the stupidest of humanity.
Living in western Europe I would have said no one, but in most of central and eastern Europe is strictly necessary to reach anyone.
And they put a notification on your phone about it that you can’t remove… this infuriates me more than it should
You’re right, I did not even notice the persistent notification! What a unnecessarily annoying move. This deserved an early bird uninstall for me…
Yeah I uninstalled as soon as I realised it was a persistent notification. Fuck that.
At least on my phone I could swipe the notification a bit to the left to reveal the cog, “disable notifications”, and disable the “standard” category of notifications.
In other news, there’s no way in hell I’m installing the full app. People texting me there will just have to wait until I’m by a computer.
Another reason my phone is rooted. I want to have the final say in whether I can remove a notification or not on my phone.
I’m also on the uninstall boat with y’all, for this reason. Lucky me, I haven’t used messenger in a year so when I saw the notification didn’t hesitate. Haven’t logged on FB in years so I doubt anyone will try to reach me there.
I swear my battery life improved after I uninstalled messenger for a while and got worse after reinstalling recently.
I wouldn’t have installed it except I was in the process of getting back in touch with a few old friends. Was totally worth it for that.
I’m on the same page. I would prefer not having those apps installed or even an account, but my friends are more worth to me than my IT ideals.
It’s too bad that your friendship isn’t more important than ten minutes of inconvenience for them to install a different app or to give you their actual phone number.
I find that you’re making a lot of assumptions on my friendships based on my 4 lines comment.
I do chat with my friends via SMS or phone cause I indeed have their number. But you can’t deny that SMS for group chats is pretty gruesome.
Based on that, everybody is used to those popular chat apps and have their other group chats on them. Why would I make them change when they work for what’s intended? Privacy is the best argument, but they may not all care enough to not find it bothering. So I don’t bother ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Live and let live
It’s exactly what social media platforms, particularly Facebook, want. They want you to feel locked in because your friends are there
I don’t know why people don’t just use more SMS. You don’t need all the fancy bells and whistles, it shouldn’t change the conversation you’re having, especially with the gradual rollout of rich messages, and it has a wider audience than Facebook will ever have. More people have SMS than have Facebook
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Everyone outside of the U.S. almost assuredly still has SMS capabilities, it’s just not common utilized because everyone is already on WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s where their friends are, locking them into the ecosystem, which is exactly what I just said. And I would be willing to wager the only reason WhatsApp really got huge was because SMS hasn’t always been free to use and may still not be free in some countries and with some plans.
Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp are fine, as for privacy how exactly are SMS better?
I wasn’t speaking to privacy specifically, but where all your friends are.
If you want privacy, then you shouldn’t be using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp anyway, considering both are owned by Meta and their privacy track record is shaky at best.
Signal is a great choice, but we get back to the main point where not everyone is on Signal, and once you are on Signal you’re locked in to using Signal and must have their app to participate in the conversation.
My point wasn’t that SMS is better, but it’s simpler and more widely available and doesn’t require a standalone application to use.
Ideally we would use an open standard like the Matrix standard to communicate, that way you can download whatever application you want and have all the privacy you could ever desire, but not have to download some random messaging application just to catch up from Gary from primary school
I wish matrix would catch on too. Basically every non US app is still tied to a damn phone number for auth, so it’s not better than sms for mobility anyway.
I’ve found the same thing with the IG and FB apps which is why I don’t use them. I stick to the mobile web versions but they have made it difficult to message from the android mobile web without extra steps like desktop mode. Even then there can be missing functionality.
There was also an article earlier this year where they were purposely “testing” the apps that forcibly drained some user batteries quickly without a care for the actual users affected. Since I’m often using my phone for navigation in the woods I want as much battery life as possible please.
Anyways if it wasn’t for older friends and family members I would no longer be using FB.
Certainly a argument can be made for this. For me it is the extended family and contacts from hobbies /sports. Without FB they would have completely faded out of my life. This low level method maintains a loose family connections once maintained by the senior family members that have long since passed. As for the others yes completely disappear from your life…
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Of course it did. They’re tracking everything you do, and everywhere you go, even when the app isn’t running. Don’t believe me? Install the Duck Duck Go browser and enable App Tracking Protection. You will be shocked by the amount of shit so many apps track in the background, but Facebook is one of the worst.
You can use Beeper to replace all your communication apps. That way you only have to install one app, and you don’t have to have Meta installed.
It sounds like a too good to be true situation. Definitely an interesting concept though. Sounds like they use remote servers to connect to the third-party apps using your credentials and then transcribe the messages using the Matrix protocol to the app. Source here and snippet below
Beeper consists of two main components:
- A client app that runs on your devices.
- A web service run by Beeper.
… Beeper’s web service consists of a Matrix homeserver and infrastructure to run open source bridges that connect to 15 different chat networks.
Currently free but also will be a Plus version eventually rolling out, according to the FAQ
For now, everyone has access to all the features of Beeper Plus for free. At some point in 2023, we will begin charging $5-10 per month for Beeper Plus.
Also, no humor is lost on the fact that it is dangerously close to Wuph from The Office…
I aigned up foe beeper, but realized you can self host a matrix server that uses the same bridges between these chat services.
I was skeptical at first, but it’s been super solid and refreshing to have a single chat app for everything.
How did you do that? I’d love to set something like that up. I keep seeing Matrix mentioned everywhere, but I haven’t looked into it to see exactly what it is.
I signed up for this month’s ago and I’m still not in. Every time I log into the app to check my waitlist, I’m some random number in the 3000s, and not always lower than last time. Why is this do you know?
I’ve never heard of beeper, but it sounds pretty inaccessible from what your saying. Is there something that makes it worth it? Or is it just another messaging app that nobody I need to speak with is using?
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I believe Beeper is Matrix under the hood. They have just made it more accessible with a new interface and pre-installed bridges.
Just signed up myself, about 40k in line it seems. Sounds like reinventing Trillian/Gaim/Pidgin/etc…
It’s a modern take on the Pidgin concept. Pidgin ran locally on one computer and didn’t sync anything between any of your other Pidgin installs. Also, your login details for every account were usually in plaintext on disk. In practice, it feels
Beeper (really Matrix + bridges) is a network service that you can access with a browser, mobile app, whatever.
If you’re technically savvy, it looks like you could self-host the application. https://github.com/beeper/self-host
This is what I did, took a bit to get it configured but works great once your up and running.
How long have you been running it so far? Any issues?
A few months for the Facebook and Instagram bridges and I just setup the Google messages Bridge last week.
I’ll take a look, cheers. Got an Raspberry Pi lying about somewhere I could use
I was in the wait list for only 20 days, according to the email when I got in. No idea why I got in so fast but others have been waiting months.
I signed up when it was first announced over a year ago. As of a couple months ago I still hadn’t gotten approved. I signed up again and within a couple days I got approved. You should try signing up again.
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Matrix with a facebook messenger bridge? I know just the one finnish instance that offers bridging (pikaviestin.fi), though. I host my own home server.
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Wow. Rough.
It’ll be a good excuse to make anyone who wants to talk to you, use something else.
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This probably won’t work for long since they’re rolling out E2EE for Messenger.
It works with whatsapp.
Oh so it’s just basically a different UI over WhatsApp?
No. Due to how whatsapp works, you have to have a phone with whatsapp installed, somewhere.
The matrix bridge connects to that, and “puppets” your account, bringin those chats into your matrix account.
Matrix can bridge to a ton of different chat services, but each one can work a little differently. They usually don’t support voice and video.
Matrix is what’s behind the scenes for beeper, for example.
Ahh gotcha. Sounds neat!
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Unfortunately FB Messenger is the defacto way to communicate in some countries - if I refused to use it I’d fail uni as I wouldn’t be able to communicate with group members, I wouldn’t be able to contact most of my family, and the number of friends I can talk to would drop to about 5 (of which most have recently had children and are thus a bit preoccupied)
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Really bad advice. Trading Meta app for Meta app. It is proprietary so you can be sure WhatsApp does not have encryption like Signal
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Where can I get info on Telegram storing messages in plain text on their servers? I have asked and searched and all I have seen are hypotheticals but nothing concrete.
I’ve read through the audit they had in 2020 where cloud chats are encrypted using the same MT Proto 2.0 which they also use for the secret chats (E2EE).
The same way that evidence is available, I would also like to see the evidence of cloud chats stored in plain text and not encrypted.
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You mentioned “plain text” specifically - where else would they be holding those plain texts?
So far, there is no evidence to suggest your messages are stored in plain text. And in 2015, Telegram was using MTProto 1.0 for their cloud chat encryption and Secret Chats E2EE. It’s been about 5-6 years since they’ve upgraded to MTProto 2.0 which has been proven to be a sound encryption protocol.
It was Moxie Marlinspike that also made the claim messages are stored in plain text on Telegram’s server with no evidence. And so far, the only thing we have are hypotheticals and nothing of substance to support that claim.
The audit done in 2020 goes over how Telegram encrypts their cloud chats and those encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. While E2EE is preferable, the reason why Telegram works the way it does is because how messages are handled by default.
Hopefully soon they will roll out Secret Group chats. But I do like we all have the option to use Telegram however we want.
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You (op) use telegram, and make a relay bot that redirects messages to/from fb messenger. You use the app of your choice, and they use the app of theirs. Big downside, is you’re still reliant on fb for messages.
This sucks.
Can’t ditch it completely due to family, but got a few more contacts over on Signal after this announcement.
Just log in to Facebook on desktop every couple of days. If they want speedy responses, they will know yto try an aternative medium.
I don’t use Facebook so I don’t know -
Why can’t you just have a group text with your family.
I can’t uninstall the Facebook app from my phone (not unless I use ADB), so it’s disabled. I uninstalled Messenger. I pinned a post on my FB page that said if people needed to contact me they can email me or text me. I have posted about why folks should leave these platforms until I am blue in the face. If they want to make the switch, they will. If they want to reach out, they will.
Eventually, I want to get an unlocked phone, load a custom ROM, and tell the big platforms to fuck off. I resent how difficult they have made that, and I resent how complacent we have become because of it.
Most phones can be unlocked provided you own it. Easier than you might think!
Carrier unlocked and oem bootloader unlocking are two very different things.
In canada, all phones must now be free of carrier locks, but bootloader unlocking is a pain. The us version of my current phone can be oem unlocked.
Mine can’t.
So, i use a lot of adb/shizuku
Your phone came with Facebook installed and you can’t uninstall it? Fucking gross! Which phone is that so I know to never buy it?
This could be true of basically any Android phone on specific carriers, at least in the US.
Sony for one. My Xperia One III (a fucking $1300 or whatever flagship) comes with a completely uninstallable Facebook apk
Or install an app called Metal.
It’s a wrapper for the mobile webpage with all the intrusive permissions disabled by default.
I just looked for this app and it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Am I wrong?
Try Hermit on Android then. You’re looking for a PWA wrapper app that lets you add them to your homescreen. Then again, your Android web browser should already have this with the “Add to homescreen” feature.
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Just gonna leave this here: https://www.signal.org/
The main issue here is how aggressive Fuckbook is when it comes to the messager, since they started to hide it on mobile devices they fucked with every attempt to revive that functionality with a none Fuckbook apps till the creator gave up. They are bad enough with normal clients (most of those died for a reason) but somehow even worse when it comes to the messager!
