I have friends who uses Facebook Messenger… exclusively.
Sure, I can SMS them if I was having a one-on-one conversation, but if I wanted to initiate a group chat, I’d have to load up the dreaded F app (well, their messenger app, but still dreaded).
Of course, I refuse to do that, I so load up Facebook on Safari, force it to load in desktop mode (because FB won’t let you open FB messenger via a browser on mobile 😠), and open up messenger that way.
It’s not hard to understand that my interactions with these people have dropped to nearly zero.
I want to encourage these friends to move their conversations off the FB platform, but then I realise that there really aren’t many alternatives.
iMessage would be my preference, but I have Android friends…
There’s WhatsApp, but that’s owned by Facebook, so what’s the point? (Unfortunately this is the second preferred platform amongst my friends)
Line seems the best bet (only because I haven’t read any damaging reports), but even that’s a silo.
I didn’t realise it, but by owning my own blog and getting into the Indieweb, I now want to own all my content, including my messages and I’m sad that I can’t.
(I know there’s email, but can you imagine trying to convince a friend – who exclusively uses FB – to use email to organise a group dinner?)
@vishae are there any group messaging services which you “own”? I mean iMessage is just apple’s walled garden right? (I totally get not wanting to use fbook)
@ChrisJWilson you’re right about that.
I guess what I mean is that I would love for group messaging to become platform agnostic – and in this scenario, I’m calling Line and iMessage platforms as well.
Like how email works currently (or one-on-one SMS), I can send you an email from Gmail using the Spark app and you don’t need either of those apps/services to receive my message.
@vishae good comparison. I wonder if RCS which google supports in its new “chat” service could be the answer? With Google’s support it probably has a better chance than any. I’d love Apple to support that.
@vishae good comparison. I wonder if RCS which google supports in its new “chat” service could be the answer? With Google’s support it probably has a better chance than any. I’d love Apple to support that.
@vishae @ChrisJWilson once upon a time there was XMPP and even Google Talk used to support it. That somehow withered away, though.
@lostfocus @ChrisJWilson I can’t help but feel that in this day and age of big corporate companies and proprietary systems, there’s little chance of something as open as email being created and allowed to flourished.
@vishae @lostfocus unfortunately I think you’re right. If Apple and google could agree on something then that might be enough but I’m not sure there is enough incentive yet.
@ChrisJWilson @vishae yeah, I guess that’s just going to be it. We can be nerdy here in our little IndieWeb/Microblog world, but as soon as it is something that needs to be used by everybody the ease of centralized systems might be winning out.