this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Fair points, but it's also completely insecure, which is hugely important to a lot of people.
That "lot of people" probably represent less than 1% of the population. "Normal" people don't use alternatives to SMS because they're more secure, they used them because otherwise they wouldn't be able to communicate with their friends.
You're on a platform where the privacy and open source crowd has a big stronghold, normies don't give a crap about that.
Heck, I'm very tech literate and the only reason I've got an alternative installed on my phone is because I've got two friends with whom it's become a meme that we use anything but SMS, everything else I do via SMS/MMS/RCS.
1% if the population is a lot of people, and encryption is becoming more and more important to "normal" people, otherwise WhatsApp etc. wouldn't be making such a big deal about it as a feature.
If you're using WhatsApp only because you need to pay for SMS or all your friends who have to pay for SMS use it, is privacy such a big deal to you?
The only reason I ever had it installed was because I became friends with people from other countries that had to pay for SMS when we didn't, they would have otherwise used SMS because it's a no brainer to just use the tech that doesn't require data and that's available by default.
Absolutely! Like I said, other protocols have their own beneft, and that's a huge one. It's why SMS for me is limited to really bland stuff when I can't get data signal in a store. Even that, I tend to keep my phone off in stores, but when you're doing "emergency" shopping for someone else, you kinda have to give up a little personal preference
Yeah, it's an excellent fallback due to its ubiquity.