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
I thought of a neck beard: “m’basic”
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.
https://www.messenger.com/ also works (requires to be running as desktop version). Still not ideal but works.
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.
Android 13 here, Messenger is 148mb, last update 11 days ago
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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.
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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!
Who tf uses messenger
Everyone in my family 😞
Texting still exists.
Being spied on by facebook, microsoft, and google is not worth the risk to me personally.
Again, who tf uses messenger?
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
You’d rather be spied on by your carrier… Got it.
Better them than companies who advertise to me directly
I don’t use either one, for very obvious reasons
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
I trust iMesssge’s e2e and Apple’s privacy a fuckovalot more than anything Facebook has ever made.
That’s fine. I trust Google’s chat app more than SMS, and others, it’s all personal preference. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that no matter what you’re using, someone has your data and is likely selling it.
If you trust apple enough to use their service, all the power to you. If you trust signal/telegram/element/whatever, that’s cool too. But no matter what service you’re using, if it’s a free public service, your data is the product. It is, in all likelihood, being sold to someone somewhere.
It’s a personal choice for how much risk you’re willing to accept on that front. Bluntly, I don’t think anyone should trust FB or any of suckerberg’s properties. Everyone else is varying levels of shit. Some much worse than others… The decisions made beyond that point are personal.
And frankly, if someone almost exclusively uses FB messenger, it says to me that they don’t give any shits about their data or what happens to it. Everything else, meh. There’s good and bad from most companies, some are doing better (signal, as an example, seems to be doing pretty good), others, not so great… Meh.
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.
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
Considering I live 2000 miles away from them and do not want them randomly showing up at my door, no thanks lol.
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) 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.
Sharing media over MMS is a garbage experience. I would need to convince them to use something reasonable, which is a lost cause.
Same.
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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.
Africa makes more sense. Imperialist nations want to influence the entire continent if possible.
USA, China, and Russia are all vying over the global-south like vultures
At least a billion people
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.
Living in western Europe I would have said no one, but in most of central and eastern Europe is strictly necessary to reach anyone.
Only the stupidest of humanity.
Well, there goes central Europe
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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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Messenger supports end-to-end encrypted chats, and more encryption features are rolling out. https://messengernews.fb.com/2023/08/22/expanding-testing-for-end-to-end-encryption-on-messenger/. It’s a huge project to implement encryption given the number of features that have to be rewritten (e.g. scraping URLs to show a preview picture now has to be done client-side rather than server-side)
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.
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I know of someone who made one a while back, but I don’t know if it would work with the current version of messenger. It’d be a fun project to figure that out, though. I’ll add it to the growing list of fun projects haha
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
They dont work for what’s intended. Its an illusion to pull money from your content and your potential ad revenue.
Thats not getting into any of the other sociological effects of a huge amount of people getting their daily news from Facebook message headlines.
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’m not on board with sms being a better service in general, but it’s kind of difficult to argue that other messaging services are superior when sms is the only one designed to be accessible without internet access.
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.
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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…
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.
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.
Yeah I just turned off every notification from Messenger Lite after seeing that. Next month I might just uninstall it completely, or opt for the Matrix bridge.
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.
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.
Because SMS doesn’t support group chats and MMS is expensive garbage (50c/300kb is fucked)
Why still use Facebook when we have the Internet?
Old people are there, some we care about, some have passed away…
There are a few decent communities out there too. Not many, but a few.
In many countries it’s the default communication app
The only and I say the only good thing I can say about Facebook Messenger is… umm…
Can somebody name at least one thing? Really, this app is shit but we must find one at least.
At least in Australia it’s by far the most popular messenger app. It wins by a landslide thanks to the network effect.
Because we have standards for at least 20 years for messaging I think we can’t say that networking effect is upside of some app, but rather the fact that everyone must use the same app is a downside.
Yeah, there’s no real alternative here. Use messenger or Don’t talk to people.
Yes, people using it as the main messaging app is still preferable to the situation in the US where people on different mobile platforms can’t message each other without bullshit compatibility issues and bubble colors.
At least here it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on - including desktops and the web - and as a result nobody cares.
Of course, the same is true for almost every other messaging service too, and there are better ones out there.
Back when people used Facebook, it was a convenient way to connect people to chats quickly and easily. I don’t think that’s the case anymore though.
It isn’t. Adding someone is always digging through people with the same name and searching for “that one with glasses on profile picture”. There are some codes to scan, but they are Facebook’s custom format incompatible with QR code scanners and inconvinient to use.
Facebook Messenger is probably the closest thing to a modern Yellow Pages as we have. Not everybody is on there, but most people are - even if they haven’t checked their profile in years. With the fall of landlines, it can be the easiest (or only) way to find/contact someone - especially if you’re a GenX or early Millennial because we have all dropped out landlines, but we created most of our social connections before any other messaging service existed. Heck, almost none of the people I knew from college in the 90s even had an email address that they stuck with (assuming I actually had email logs going back thirty years). It’s nice that so many message services exist, but most have no way to “look someone up” the way it’s possible to do on something like messenger/fb. (admittedly - it’s both good and bad)
I suppose there’s a chance that LinkedIn is the other major database of real names out there; I’ve never tried it for locating people.
Some of my late mum’s friends only use Facebook. Not saying it’s ideal, but… a single good thing, right?
Marketplace became the defacto replacement for craigslist in my area 😔
It’s the only reason I use it and, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s really well done/seamless/painless to use. Literally the only good think on FB (until they inevitably ruin it too). Has fantastic consumer protections.
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 signed up for 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.
@Unsustainable @bananahammock @technology Matrix is a protocol for real time communication. Several companies build products using this protocol, including Elemental, Beeper and Rocket Chat.
This is similar to how ActivityPub is a protocol for federated social media. Many projects are built using ActivityPub, including Mastodon, PixelFed, and Lemmy.
@Unsustainable @bananahammock @technology
A “Matrix Bridge” is a computer program that connects to an arbitrary service and presents it as Matrix service. You can connect to that Matrix service with any Matrix client.
For example, this code connects LinkedIn messages to Matrix: https://github.com/beeper/linkedin
Beeper runs Matrix bridges for you as a service. If you don’t want to use that service, you can self-host the bridges.
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?
If you’re technically savvy, it looks like you could self-host the application. https://github.com/beeper/self-host
I’ll take a look, cheers. Got an Raspberry Pi lying about somewhere I could use
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’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.
Yep, didn’t mean it to sound like I was putting it down. Sounds like a cool concept.
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.
Genuinely I just found an invite code from Google. Once you’re in the app is pretty much as advertised.
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.
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Just gonna leave this here: https://www.signal.org/
Well, family at least is going to be willing to switch to signal…
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
If I can get a custom ROM to work on my current phone, I’m all for it! I was looking at specific unlocked phone brands because some custom ROMS are optimized for that hardware.
Check out the XDA Forums section for your carrier’s version of whatever model of phone you have. Not all carriers make it trivial (or even possible) to unlock the bootloader and flash custom recovery images, but if it’s possible then someone there has certainly done it.
Thank you for this!
My next phone will be a pixel so I can flash grapheneOS on it. I don’t think my Snapdragon S21 can run custom firmware without triggering Samsung Knox though
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.
I guess I’ll always stick with the Pixel Pro then.
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?
On the play store page I got the message “not available on your device, this app has been designed for an older version of Android”, not updated since June 2018 and I can’t find it anywhere else, seems you’re not
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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Better idea don’t install messenger at all
