this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Between a corpo job only using teams and email and international folks all using WhatsApp I kinda want to just go back to irc and stay there forever. Everything that came after it has just been worse.
https://xkcd.com/1782/
Yup, also my experience. Maybe Jabber. Jabber was great.
I still have a copy of my irc bot setup somewhere....
What is up with WhatsApp all over the place? It's a demonstrably inferior experience to damn near any alternative at this point.
It was one of the first and now no one wants to move, quite simple.
Several messaging services that started on PCs already had mobile apps when Whatsapp got big so there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.
Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.
For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.
But all those you listed weren't available internationally I believe. Atleast in the US, ask anyone who came to work how they keep in touch with people back home, and they'll likely say whatsapp.
Skype certainly was. It would make an interesting case study - what drove adoption when there were established competitors with more resources?
Phone numbers, phone apps and the international market. Skype was in a lot of places only popular for business, Whatsapp was everyone's very first doorway into a modern messenger app.
my main gripe with irc is the lack of history