Nobody knows about RCS, but it can groups and so you can convince those who refuse to do anything but WhatsApp something else
I haven’t used WhatsApp for many years and I generally do very well with it. This means: Unfortunately, not being able to participate in parent groups is a feature and not a bug. Try it out, it’s wonderfully peaceful. Since it’s been around, I’ve reached most of my regular contacts via Threema and almost everyone else via Signal or not at all or, if necessary, via SMS. This works surprisingly well and has the pleasant side effect that my cell phone number doesn’t circulate uncontrollably among people I don’t actually want to give it to.
People who use Telegram are too close to these people who use Telegram for me and I have no desire to go anywhere near lateral thinker circles, nor do I have any more reference to Eastern Europe than the daily war reporting on YouTube that is constantly on it points out that they can’t show this or that video on this platform, but you can have all the fright on Telegram. I gratefully forego authentic video content of soldiers flying around in pieces, because blurry drone footage of exploding armored vehicles is more than I ever wanted to see in my life. What kind of world is this?
But there are still people who are of the opinion that WhatsApp is just the one standard and if everyone used it, there would be no more problems. Depending on the peer group, this may or may not be true, but it deliberately ignores the fact that most people use at least two messengers because messenger fragmentation has long been a reality. And these people consequently stubbornly refuse to use any other channel for real-time written communication. These are the people I usually text and it feels terribly backwards. On the other hand, I’m sitting in a glass house, because here in the technology diary I refuse to use the editorial chat on Facebook Messenger and thus force Kathrin to communicate with me via direct messages on Mastodon (formerly on Twitter) and tell me things there. That’s not backwards, but it’s an unnecessary extra fuss.
And I’m currently ready to fry such an extra sausage with exactly one person from my regular social contacts. And that’s only because it feels strange to run a signal group with three people in a two-couple constellation and exclude the fourth person. So if the mountain doesn’t come to the prophet, but there are no SMS groups… But what about this strange SMS successor RCS, which is particularly noticeable because the SMS app sometimes switches to it without asking and then you don’t receive the message gets delivered and have to switch back to SMS somewhere in the settings? So I just try to open a group in Google Messages and it actually works. However, a message indicates that end-to-end encryption cannot be enabled because my wife’s Messenger app (which is from Samsung, not Google) doesn’t support it. After I installed Google Messages there and set it as the default app for messaging, the encryption was activated immediately and I did some quick research: This is an implementation from Google that goes beyond the RCS standard and uses Signal’s encryption process. This is mostly good news because this implementation is considered particularly good and messaging without end-to-end encryption is simply no longer up to date. What’s not so good is the one-sided extension beyond the standard, but in this case I don’t care as long as it works.
All in all, I now have a group with one person who doesn’t really want to use anything other than WhatsApp to make their life easier and I have to admit that it gives me a little thieving joy. Because when all the explaining doesn’t work, creating facts sometimes develops a wonderfully normative power.
(Gregor Meyer)