Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
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Telegram
Discord, Telegram, SMS
I keep wanting to like Signal but the fact that they refuse to allow multi-device use kills it for me. I can go for days at a time never checking my phone, every app I use also delivers messages to my tablet.
Signal allows you to use the desktop client for multi-device use
Yeah, but it sucks lol
The nature of Signal being end-to-end encrypted by default without any third party in the middle does add some limitations for the desktop app. I do wish I could insert a fucking GIF though.
Germany: Only aware of WhatsApp but I don’t chat much…
Personally online: Discord
I just use SMS. I don’t need to install anything extra or make some sort of extra account somewhere. Phone plans here have had unlimited texts for like over a decade now so we aren’t spending extra money here to send texts either.
SMS is notoriously unreliable, plus insecure as hell.
As in it’s known across the industry that upward of 10% of messages fail, and since SMS lacks error detection (and thereby no error correction), you have no idea when your message never arrived.
We have read reciepts, granted idk how those work all together
Not on SMS you don’t. I’ve seen SMS apps that claim to have verification, at most that’s a verification the edge router of your service received it.
Since there’s no error detection, there’s no way to universally implement read receipts across vendors.
SMS is a best-effort system. Like shouting at the clouds, unfortunately.
Not on SMS you don’t.
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As an American living in Germany, I have:
- Signal
- Matrix
- Discord
- Telegram
- SimpleX
- SMS via Google Voice for some very stubborn Americans
Everyone I know in Europe uses Signal or Whatsapp, often both. Sometimes when I suggest to Americans who live in the US that they should use one of those, they counter that I should buy an iPhone and use iMessage.
As a fellow American, fuck iMessage. I wish we were more like Europe in that regard.
I’ve even seen technically-sophisticated adults exclude people from group conversations for not having iPhones. The resistance to using anything else is weird. I’m even willing to add to the above list if somebody has a different preference that isn’t the one thing not everyone can use.
With the Digital Market Act in the EU they’ll soon all be speaking to each other. Vestager is about to tear those messaging monopolies a new asshole!
That sounds good, until you realize that your data will then end up with Meta after you specifically left all of their services.
That’s a GDPR request away from deletion, at least in the EU (and for a while at least, the U.K.)
I don’t want them to have my data. It doesn’t matter how easy it is to delete them. And basically every time someone scans their contacts I might get re-added to allow this cross functionality
Its so weird how standardised the use of Apple Phones is in the US
How ya liking SimpleX? I’m just rocking Discord, Matrix for internet ppl WhatsApp and Telegram for RL ppl. Used to use Signal, but Telegram replaced it a while back for me. Way better feature set.
Are you using Telegram for its privacy and E2EE or just for the features. Because Telegram sure is not private nor does it have any E2EE unless you specifically select to be in a “secure chat” with someone.
Nah, just for the features. It’s secure enough for just chit chat. I only use the secure message chat when I need to send documents to family. I just like that they have clients on every platform, including Linux.
It’s chaos. Well, unless you count SMS.
There really isn’t a single dominant app/service, though apple and imessages comes close. But, since that’s apple only, it doesn’t truly dominate in the way whatsapp does in some places.
In my local area (a rural mountain zone in the Southeast), the most common single one is telegram. The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
County wide, it’s still Facebook over telegram, but not by much. Then imessage. You can even rely on apple monkeys using one or both of the others since the county school system sends on both of them as well as via SMS for major events.
My kid and most of the high school kids do discord among themselves, but still use the others away from that.
Tbh, though, I have come to prefer not having a single messaging service be dominant. It was (and still can be) a pain in the ass using multiple apps, but at least you’re not totally fucked if you refuse to use whatever else the majority have decided to use because it’s easier.
The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
Who led the push?
There was a huge problem with it being over used by the mayor’s office as a semi official channel. When the mayor got himself into a bit of trouble, those folks that were working to get him ousted made a big deal out of him corporatizing the office of mayor and town business in that way, and it made sense to use it as a tool against him. He was trying to treat it like if he said something there, it was a done deal, and it counted as some kind of replacement for posting such things publicly.
The push was from a group of like minded residents that included the county sheriff, the chief of police, myself, and the librarian. I can’t truly say anyone led the push, though the librarian would come closest. We all just got sick of him, and used what we could to get people moving against him. People were starting to hate Facebook locally because of some school drama anyway, so it was easy enough to stoke that fire.
Get people from the various town departments to stop using it, get their families and friends to help convince them if they weren’t on board. If he can’t reach anyone via messenger that’s part of the local government, it cuts that out, and ties him into the whole arguments over school aged access to Facebook in general.
It worked! Which was a bit of a surprise to all involved. But it was the right confluence of events. He was fucking up with covid issues, fucking up the people that actually run the town on a direct basis, and doing so while being an asshole as a person. There was no way he was winning the next election, but he could fuck things up before then.
Once the entire police force officially abandoned messenger, it was a bit of a death knell. Individual officers still used it, but the group chats he was using died totally.
Small town drama, in other words.
This reeks of bot
How?
I dont really know. The grammar, the style, the even distribution of paragraphs. I feel like noone writes like that…
Welcome to my life lol.
I have run into this kind of thing a lot. Once, on reddit, I got accused of lying because I wrote a pretty personal story with a little style. I write more casually and get crap for not paying attention to perfect grammar and typing. I stay to bland recital of facts and now I’m boring. I tell a simple story here with no embellishments, and I’m a bot lol.
Fwiw, I have published three books in my life so far. I’ve done custom fiction for people, and some research and reporting freelance stuff too. I’m not saying I’m a great writer or anything, just that bots try to mimic what jabronie writers do. They get fed data from articles written by people that follow basic style guidelines, like keeping paragraphs to manageable sizes, using accessible but (hopefully) clear grammar rather than fully formal.
So it’s no surprise I end up looking like a bot, fellow human.
Damn this madness, it’s much better when there is only one giant megacorp like with everything else!
SMS text messaging unless it’s a group chat/voice call for gaming, in which case it’s Discord.
Really? People pay for short, unencrypted messages that can barely handle accented characters, let alone media, when there are free alternatives that are much better in the vast majority of scenarios?
Or is free sms a common thing in people’s phone plans?
I’ve had unlimited sms since before I had a smart phone.
It outsmarted them.
Almost all phone plans have unlimited texting. Or at least it seems that way.
Like others have commented, unlimited texting has been available in most phone plans for the better part of a decade now; I’d struggle to name a place that offers plans without it.
As for the accented characters, that’s something I personally don’t encounter much as a native English speaker. I obviously can’t speak for those who do need those keyboards, but for me it’s not a problem.
With regards to encryption/privacy, I can’t say that’s a concern I’ve personally had regarding my texts. Could the government read my messages? Probably, but all they’re getting is cute cat pics and random chatter about games and food and whatnot. Again, that’s another aspect that’s probably more of a concern for people in more sensitive situations, but I can’t speak for them.
USmobile still offers non-unlimited plans. I thought ting did as well, but I guess that changed at some point. But I think I’ve only heard of one person using USMobile.
The problem in the US is that the iPhone has a huge amount of the market and iMessage mostly does that already. For Android to counter that you have to use a 3rd party app, which further fractures an already smaller market. Or everyone could just use sms which is free with basically every plan nowadays, which gets you by.
Pay? In the US we haven’t paid extra for SMS since about 2005. Which partly explains why it’s prevalent.
Well most messages can be understood without accented characters and SMS is dependable to work on all devices.
My plan is $25/month for unlimited talk, text, and 5g data.
Canada’s pretty close to America, so I’ll answer. My family uses WhatsApp. Better than unencrypted, at least.
You’re not going to get a very representative sample here. Signal is great but a lot of North Americans haven’t even heard of it.
We love our 51st state in the north ;)
Thank you, and fuck you too.
Like, you’re not wrong, but in case it wasn’t intended telling someone their country isn’t real is generally considered an insult.
No, it was a lighthearted joke. I genuinely have had almost nothing but good experiences with Canadians. Like, 8/10 encounters with unknown fellow Americans is anything from indifferent to bad. Canadians, it’s been more like 1/10 is bad. Mind you, one of those was trying to bang my mom and grabbed my ass, so he can continue fucking right off lol.
Have you never run across that before though? Where you make fun of a bad stereotype? Like, Americans treating canada like an extension is a common enough thing that I see it online all the time as a serious thing, so it becomes a joke in itself.
As a former Vermonter we used to delight in considering ourselves part of Quebec. Hell, most of our power came from Hydro Quebec.
Hey, and you’ve already succeeded in separating from Canada!
No, it was a lighthearted joke.
Ah good. Keep shootin’!
No it’s really typical banter, it’s just with Americans you can’t be sure how aware they are. Same with Chinese if you can talk to them, apparently; it must be a byproduct of being a giant self-contained hyperpower.
Sorry you got downvoted.
No worries :)
Damn. Here in Quebec pretty much everyone seems to default to FB Messenger.
I’m pretty curious to know what got a bunch of prairie farmers on WhatsApp, but I suspect it leads back to India fairly quickly. Unfortunately, French-speaking Indians are a rare breed.
iMessage/SMS and Messenger are what most of my friends use. Although I know people who use Snapchat at work. I don’t anyone who uses Telegram or Signal.
sms
I have family who use facebook messenger but I refuse.
SMS. Universal and ubiquitous thanks to free or nearly free inclusion in phone plans. American English has no need for expanded character sets and carriers/Apple/Google have added just enough features on top that the vast majority of people aren’t left wanting for more.
Instant payment was literally impossible until this summer, and given it’s so new almost no bank has support for it yet. Privacy/encryption don’t enter into most people’s consciousness.
SMS was ubiquitous here in NA while data was already ubiquitous but SMS heavily metered in most of the rest of the world.
Instant payment? I hope you’re not talking about NFC because that’s been around for a long time now.
They might mean instant bank transfers, like OSKO in Australia. Google tells me a service called FedNow is available through 35 banks as of July this year which supports instant bank transfers.
Oh man I could really go on about how terrible US banking is. It’s a shitshow.
It takes me a week to pull funds via ACH from a personal checking account to a business checking account; all because I can’t “push” the funds because there’s an HTTP 500 from their REST API when I try to switch my “funding” account from the personal checking account.
So much of my life revolves around ACH and I don’t even want to know how much of my life I’ve wasted on it. Half the time I use Cash App and the credit network to move funds instantly because these idiots at NACHA can’t figure out what anything beyond COBOL is.
Bingo. It’s wild to me to hear other countries doing tons of their payments via apps. US is 10 years behind the rest of the world on that.
We have things like Venmo and cashapp that approximate the same thing, but in the end it’s just the same ACH transfers the banking industry has used for 30 years and takes days to process. The apps just hide that behind the scenes. FedNow actually means instant and 24/6 (still doesn’t run on Sunday, if I recall correctly).
OSKO is even better than payment apps. Basically every bank offers is as a payment method option (if not the default) for any transfer, at 0 cost. They’re also implementing a new system to replace direct debits, to add more consumer protection and control to the recurring billing market.
Most people I know use SMS/RCS/iMessage or Discord. My family uses Signal, but I don’t know anyone else IRL that has even heard of it. I personally don’t like Signal because they don’t have some basic features, such as if you get a new phone, you need to export/import all of your old messages manually. If your old phone broke or your traded it in already, tough shit. If you log in on your laptop, afaik, there’s no way to get your old messages from your phone. I know these were intentional design decisions to make it as secure as possible, but I would be fine with something being slightly less secure to have these QOL features.
Always interesting when I hear people’s families use something other than the default in the US. What started that? Were your parents always concerned about privacy? Did you somehow convince them to use that app? What about when they text someone who isn’t on signal, which is probably 90% of the US? I could get my family to download the app but I feel like it’s pointless because no one else uses it so they would just quit.
My parents were going out of the country where they wouldn’t have cell access, and they just googled what to use. Signal is what came up first in a list they read online. They knew that they didn’t like Facebook and wanted to avoid Whatsapp for that reason. After we made a family chat group, it just kind of stuck. If we want to send something to the whole family, we use that group. If we send something directly to each other, we still usually use SMS/RCS/iMessage.
I’ve been in the Cyber Security space for a few decades now and have all of my close family on Signal. It’s another step in helping them understand what privacy options are out there and how to best protect themselves.
We’ve also managed to not have any of the more egregious social media platforms (Meta, X, TikTok, etc…) as well as VPN’s on everything and PiHoles at the perimeter.
It sounds paranoid to most of the other families we know but, to each there own I suppose. And knowing the people in my household stand a chance against the ever persistent push of advertising / privacy invasion is worth sounding like a madman once in a while.
Who convinced your family? I tried to do the same with my family and friends to no avail.
My dad, mostly. I just explained it in another comment.
Signal definitely has some room to improve with regard to backup/sync. It should probably never store your messages on its servers, which is what it would take for you to get your history back if you lose access to all your devices containing it, but it could allow you to keep the full history in sync across multiple devices without compromising its security guarantees.
Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber.
South Europe? In Italy everyone uses WhatsApp
I was surprised to read that a country in South Europe mainly used Viber. I’m not European but I’m almost definite that WhatsApp has the largest market share for chat apps in all of Europe. Maybe Telegram coming a close second
If you move a bit east of Italy, to that peninsula that should not be named, Viber gets real popular.
In Greece, you’re right. But most Europe is on WhatsApp and telegram
Florida?
balkan
🤫
*In Croatia
Discord and SMS.
I am German and use Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, Threema and SMS because NO ONE CAN MAKE UP THEIR FUCKING MINDS!!!1!!11!
Some people seem to be extra confusing and contact me on multiple channels based on the moon cycle or whatever the fuck.
based on the moon cycle
Lol, right? Wtf?
the worst part is when they start calling 🙄
10000000% this … Like I just wish everyone used Telegram for IRL chat. Matrix and Discord is fine, there is even a bridge server you can run, so everyone can chat ala IRC. (We run one, it’s great).
I have a friend with multiple active numbers. Very fun to figure out.
