It's Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for me. I ditched the Facebook app a long time ago, but Messenger and Whatsapp remain on my device because no one wants to leave them. I try to keep my chats there as superficial as possible.

Also, this is my first comment ever on Lemmy, so hi everyone!

Asking people to leave things means they're losing a line of communication to friends, family, and interest groups who still use those things. It's probably more productive to ask people to add the services you prefer rather than leave the ones they're used to.

I've encountered some resistance from Americans who use iPhones and hate the idea of adding a third-party messaging app. None of them seem very interested in justifying that position.

Networking effect

People use whatever is most popular even if its the shittest thing such as Facebook.

Only time people will care is when it personally and tangibly affects them.

For Facebook/whatsapp watomatic can be used to remind people you are leaving or such.

Discord is a hard one because it has some uniqueness to it.

It has bots, text channels, voice channels, and hundreds of thousands of people can join it if you need to.

A lot of my college clubs use it and there are a few thousand students in our biggest ones

It's because our marketing sucks. People don't care about their privacy, they like what is cool. So what does that mean? It mean we gotta make using open source app so cool that people can't help but join because all the cool kids are here. You feel me? Preaching alone is not enough although it will benefit all of us

I less have an issue with people getting trapped in software they understand is insecure, and more with people who will push shit like telegram and pretend its the most private and secure thing ever invented. If they want to use discord, sure, fine with me. As long as they know not to do their activist work on discord I'm fine with it. People doing activist work/planning over telegram will never make me not cringe.

Signal isn't something I personally want to use, but its tolerable, and it was doing a good job of replacing telegram in activist spaces I felt, but I've recently seen a few different groups using telegram again because they don't trust signal.

xmpp with omemo is what I wish I could get people to use but uh, well, that just will never happen.

People don't typically like change. It has to feel like it's their decision to drive them there.

What are some good alternatives to discord?

I convinced my friends to get Discord so we could communicate as a community without Facebook. Now I have figured out it is just as bad. I tried Matrix and couldn't figure out how to log in before I heard it's enshittification is underway.

Comfort and scared of change. The dopamine these sites give you is close to sex for some people as weird as it sounds. So if you tell them to stop using Instagram, they can't process that and simply say no.

This is just part of human nature. Some of us are able to say "hey this website is run by horrible people and I refuse to support it." We leave and find other options and help them grow. We are in the minority.

Most people simply do not want to try something everyone else doesn't use cause they don't want to seem weird. Stupid societal norms.

"privacy? Yeah whatever, they just use it to catch bad people right? I have nothing to hide. I don't have the time to learn all this VPN stuff. Don't forget to like my posts!"

So just use something different yourself. Then ask your friends to communicate with you there. You don't need them to quit the old, you need to ask them to use something new.

Network effect and the path of least resistance.

People usually resist change until there's a net and obvious gain, or when thing don't work as expected anymore.

And you need to consider that what's important in a messaging platform for someone, might be vastly different for another.

Probably the idea of "all my other friends are on the mainstream platform so why would i move to another platform specifically for you?"

Not really. I have none of those apps or alternatives. and I don't know anyone I want to chat with on Discord, WhatsApp, Insta, or other. Not that I'm antisocial, I just have no interest. Lemmy is about as close as I want to get to anyone. Before, it was Reddit, but they have tanked as a place to search for knowledge.

I have the same issue, but got 2 Discord users to try Jitsi Meet with me (a friend of mine on my Snikket server invited her friend). After a while, her friend asked me why it looked so much alike Discord and my friend agreed. I gave them a big smile and said, "because this is awesome".

Jitsi Meet + Snikket has been my saves since I deleted my Discord account during the pandemic.

Why is it so hard to get friends to leave

I mean the reason is usually summed up with a single word when I make the suggestion: "Why?". People don't know and/or don't care. You try and explain it and they mock you and act like you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

what apps do you feel most trapped in?

Geeze, you name it. Right now I need a new job, and if you're not looking on Indeed, you're severely limiting your options. You can't see anything on Indeed without creating an account and turning over ALL of your personal details, much less actually submit an application. Not to mention the site itself is just horrendous to use. If we had some sort of technological standard protocol for submitting resumes ( so you could send them the same way you send contact info via .vcf), or even OCR that actually worked, it could be a lot easier, but we don't, so the alternative is going and typing in all of your information for every individual application, which simply doesn't work when you're submitting a couple dozen every day, on top of their meaningless personality quizzes and chatting endlessly with AI bots, and aptitude tests and video response interviews and and and...

I make a good % of my money for my business using FB and IG. Not through ads but just through networking. Although I'm about to close my doors (due to unrelated market circumstances), at which point I'll delete them. But then I will mostly lose access to all of the events that are shared exclusively on these platforms. I ask them to share them elsewhere but it's more of the same, mocking and asking why.

When it comes to open source, Discord and Reddit seem to be the platforms of choice. Usually this means I simply ignore otherwise-promising projects.

Fortunately almost no one has ever asked me to use WhatsApp. Usually only international travelers. I usually just decline and/or ask them to use Signal.

Yeah, this is so fucking annoying. I've been banging on about Signal for years, but everyone except a small handful of my wisest friends insist upon using WhatsApp and Discord.

Almost everyone I know also uses Instagram, and no other social media. I am yet to meet someone in real life who even has Mastodon.

People can’t be convinced of anything, it’s a losing battle to try. The only way to get people to change is to live a certain way and if people admire it, then they ask you about it and you share.

So for example-I’m a minimalist and I really wished my sister would declutter because her place is overcrowded. But instead of trying to convince her, I just shared what my life normally was like. Eventually she asked me for help decluttering, and she felt a lot better about what I helped with. Now we share cleaning and organization tips.

For me, I just put in my insta bio I left for Pixelfed and to come friend me there.

I’ve told my friends I’m off insta because I’d rather be on a platform where I control my feed that’s ad free. And that I rarely see my friends content on insta so it doesn’t matter that much to me to have friends on there. If they get interested, great if not, I’m still happy.

Discord is fairly unique, there isn't really a replacement for it that works well.

SMS

Nobody wants to use a messaging app at all. At this point I'd rather be stuck on WhatsApp. But its all family. Big family and try to get them to agree on anything is like pulling teeth.

I even sent everybody a "contact card" I made with my links to signal, simplex, and even whatsapp (figuring that's the path of least resistance) saying I'd prefer to communicate on any of those apps. ZERO people changed nor did they even ask about it, options, or my reasoning.

I ditched meta platforms entirely for signal in 2019, lets say I dont have many close friends anymore haha, my social life is kaput, even my work groupchat is on facebook

The inconvenience of switching and learning a new thing is the largest deterrent. People complain but don't care enough due to those reasons to switch.

I only text people on Signal, except the old grandparents or potential new friends that I will in time get to switch to Signal.

Get their parents to sign up. Feels like grannies sharing minion memes and Bible verses was the end of facebook's cool era.

Discord for me. A bunch of my family and friends are avid gamers. Discord is the universal standard app they all use for general communication.

Not only do they use it for all their gaming related stuff, they have additional servers and channels for just chilling, chatting, off topic stuff, memes, politics, etc etc.

It's the network effect. Even if there was an open source app that perfectly replicated all the functionality of Discord and was just as simple to install and run as Discord, most of them still wouldn't switch to it, because all of their friends and family are still on Discord.

So they would have to have two completely separate apps with totally separate social groups to maintain, and nobody but hardcore advocates for FOSS and privacy are willing to do that.

Sure, I have Discord, Matrix, IRC, Signal, XMPP clients, and a Private Mumble server, all on my systems, but I'm hardcore about FOSS. None of my friends and family are willing to do that. It took all my energy to convince two of my most techie friends just to get Signal on their phones. And only One has been willing to install a Matrix client to chat just with me.

Because people keep pushing for them to completely leave a platform.

Instead try to get them to dual-use platforms.

I don't have very many friends, although of the ones I do have the majority of them use Signal, or are terrified of recent politics and I'm trying to move them over currently. I'm not concerned about platform lock-in for communicating over proprietary platforms since if something happens we can just move, I am concerned about the security implications.

I'm still on Discord because everyone else is there. I've moved my direct social connections, so most of the things I'd use Discord dms for on a daily basis, over to dedicated direct messaging services, but communities are so much harder to move over. You can't shuffle between a hundred and a thousand people over to another platform unless somehow most of the groups they're in move over at once.

And to what? Matrix communities are not as convenient, Revolt's voice chats are not as good and screen sharing wasn't a thing at all last I checked and it doesn't have a mobile client, and TeamSpeak is primarily voice-based.

Cory Doctorow refers to this as the Anatevka problem.

1. move your closed source messengers to another phone
2. keep it always turned off additionally with all the graphene features, always at home, somewhere inconvenient
3. open it once a week, and you will see who needs to contact you will ask you for a better way to communicate

People will still use discord even if it got entirely banned, there just isn't a good alternative now that is clear

These are just opinions, but here are the two I know about (I don't use WhatsApp)

Discord: It's not just you. You would have to get their other connections, all their servers, and all the connections from those servers to switch. Frankly speaking, Revolt isn't ready for that to happen. You are one person. I'm sorry, but if I have 1 friend vs. all of my servers and friends, I'm not going to make a meaningful change for the one person. And tbh I'm more likely to be the one than the many. What I would suggest is to try and put yourself between the two services, help to build the communities you want to see, then invite people over.

Instagram: Same issue as Discord. The fediverse doesn't have the variety of content, the wide range of users, or half the stuff to engage with.

Threaten them with having to communicate with you using email - they'll install Signal 😂

I had my wife and best friend using signal until they dropped support for sms. Switching between apps was too much for us.

I just cannot fathom how people use discord to communicate. Maybe if it's a very small group like ten people tops. But anything bigger? Seems like chaos.

Because everyone else they know is there. If the people they follow and interact with moved to Mastodon or switched messengers to Signal, you’ll see how quickly they will move. It’s hard to convince someone to sign up or install a new app if it’s only you they’ll find there. I was able to switch my family over to Signal and they literally use it only for family group chats, because they don’t know anyone else who uses it. And they were a little easier to convince because they’re family. I won’t be able to convince people with less close ties to me like friends, acquaintances, and neighbors.

For me it's Discord, I can't find a good enough self hosted alternative with all the features me and my friends want.

Can't speak to the other apps but I have like 6 or 7 Discord servers that I'm actively involved in and a half dozen others I use sporadically. Even if I got all my friends to switch apps for our group chat I'd still need Discord for the servers I use and I'd rather not juggle two apps that are doing the same thing (actually already doing this with Discord and a text group chat and it's annoying as fuck). Also, switch to what?

Imagine it's the 90s again, everyone has a phone number, but one person will only talk to you via ham radio. Same energy.

For communication, people will prefer what everyone is using, simply because it's easier to reach someone else. Herd behavior. You can try to get them in, but pressure will mean that it'll be you who will have to either give up and cave in to use Discord, Whatsapp, etc, or get removed from the talks for refusing to be where they want to.

I wish I could leave whatsapp, but it's a literal case of "everyone uses it" in Brazil. Even the short, justice mandated wpp blackouts couldn't keep people on telegram for more than 2 days.

It's hard - give them a compelling reason to leave. I use Telegram, Signal, Discord and Session... Discord is rarely used - I use Telegram and Signal the most. Session is quite new.

But what we need is for someone like Mozilla to make a messaging app - someone with the users best interest at the heart, and who don't share anything with anyone else... And at a reasonable price... Privacy isn't free - if anyone should be in doubt.

I think for my friends it's just what we have been using for literally a decade since we were kids, combined with apathy towards privacy - although of my friends does use duckduckgo. I don't judge them for that since I've been pretty bad with privacy. I do worry if we get into more activism that we will need to secure our privacy

People don't just stop using an app until there's very little activity.

Getting people to use a new app, especially one they have little activity on is inconvenient, especially if you're already checking WhatsApp, wechat, signal, telegram, LINE, Zalo, and discord because you have to many different friend groups.

Because on every occasion – at least in the case of Signal – they tried to switch, it was a far inferior experience for them, and the leadership behind the app/service took such puritanical decisions that it became evident that the ideology was more important than the people those tools were supposed to help/protect. I don't even bother asking my friends now. In fact, now, for me as well, those (Signal, Matrix, etc.) are just things collecting dust on my spare phone.

Totally get you. It's why I roll my eyes anytime someone say "Be the change you want to see" as if I wasn't trying to and also getting a burntout from doing so. Easier said than done.

Sadly, people are simply just so comfortable with whatever massaging & social media app they used that trying out other alternatives is immediately dismissed as a inconvenient before they even tried it. And also we are so used to corporation taking so many of our data that some are just numbed about it and see it as a losing battle or they don't know how much valuable their information is which you often get the infamous "I got nothing to hide" BS.

I have got few my friends to use Signal when I was about to delete my Instagram. Still in contact with them which is a small victory for me.

I'm personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.

Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won't be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn'r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to "add me" easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I'm not too bothered by having it as I don't use it daily or anything.

Chasing the hot new app that was created by some one-person dev team for "privacy" reasons is a little like chasing amy. You are looking for an ideal app that doesn't exist, so you can't really suggest a better alternative. Instead you are just nagging people for using discord or imessage even though those apps are perfectly fine for 99% of people. Even privacy focused people. imessaage specifically is great for privacy and unless you have strong evidence of an apple installed backdoor for the p2p imessage encryption I'd question why your are against it.

Yes, I understand. The annoying thing is that you end up with two or more apps for the same purpose. Mid-term, I think the only way to go is to go cold turkey at some moment, but it will costs you some friends and family contacts.

Yeah well imagine what it is when you are old yourself… having a majority of like aged friends and even older family… no one is ever leaving FB before they are ded :-/

Because their other friends are on them, and the celebrities they follow.

Because lot of people just either don't care, are too lazy to switch, or the vast majority of their friends and family still use the apps.

In addition, they may feel like they are losing out on something, especially for Instagram where a large portion of the population uses regularly.

So like, this is always seemingly done from a content CONSUMER point of view.

How can we provide content creators a safety net whom we as fans enjoy their content but said artists need to have their name and face out in the open? Particularly music artists/DJs/independent artists/etc?

I swear, anyone wanting privacy, just start calling yourself an artist and boom suddenly nobody can find any information about you! You don't even have to be serious about it, just take a crayola to a bar napkin... /s

I tried to get friends to use Signal. It's hard because it's a new app they e never used. One flat out refuses to use anything other than SMS and one messaging app to avoid bloat, and the others it's just hard to get buy in when you're the only person they know using it.

Understanding why those platforms are bad is another layer of thought that most people aren't capable or willing to engage in.

Tech illiteracy is the biggest reason.

These days people dont hardly know what IRC or a router is/does, theyre not going to change to any other application unless its DEAD easy.

Also I despise discord UI and always have. I must just be old, but its sucks and is horribly designed. Now it has built in ads so it really pisses me off. At least most of my friends moved on from Snapchat (literal Spyware).

I can't control my contacts. I can control what I do. I was personally getting annoyed enough with Discord that I uninstalled the thing and stopped visiting it on the web. My account still exists AFAIK. I didn't make a big production of it nor tell anyone; I simply left.

It was a bit of a sacrifice because I don't connect with an extremely rewarding community on there as much anymore. Thankfully they still host IRL meetups and I do go to those.

I'm opinionated about messaging apps but I don't try to convince anyone. Well, other than siblings and SOs. People who want to talk to me can find me on the apps I do hang out in. If they ask why I'm not on the big ones I will gladly tell them. But where they end up is their decision, not mine.

Honestly, when or if eu chat control happens I'll just delete all of those applications and never tell anyone, I am not gonna use sms either

People are lazy

The crux is that all the alternatives suck. I don't have a problem going App hopping, I just have a very hard time finding ones that don't fundamentally suck, and I am not talking about little implementation issue, but garbage like Signal that violates the GDPR, wants your phone number and is proud of it. Always grinds my gears when that gets celebrated as the "alternative". Same with the Fediverse, where user owns nothing and server operator controls everything, how again is that different from Reddit, Facebook and Co.?

Nostr and Tox seem ok so far, but really the amount of true alternatives that improve on the original in significant ways is pretty damn rare.

Partially, it's because the incumbent platforms are just much better.... Discord is really good.

I have got some people to move to signal though. I don't touch Facebook messenger.

It's hard to get people to care about things. I've gotten a couple people to switch to signal (which I hope is good), but I have one holdout who keeps saying "ill switch later". I don't understand why "take 3 minutes to install signal" can't be done right now, but I'm not a mess of depression, anxiety, and debt, so I've just been giving them gentle reminders every so often.

Find new friends in Russia. These are banned there

I think the way we are trying to make technology sound sophisticated and our refusal to reinvent language makes technology become much less accessible than what they should be.

Honestly, I've just made new friends. If I had to drop friends and family because they refused to move over, that's fine. I can just make some new friends.

For the same reason it's difficult to turn people away from communism. Phlegmatic ignorance.