*gasp*
Who could have ever seen this move coming? From Facebook, of all companies!
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
840 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
72988 readers
2901 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
To be fair, I am shocked... Not to see a Pikachu face in the comments.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Good news good Signal.
"We will never show you ads in WhatsApp. We promise". --Facebook when they bought WhatsApp and promised the previous owner not to force ads in the app...
load more comments
(1 replies)
If thats not a reason to switch to Signal what is.
But people just suck it up anyway, they did when reddit gone to shit, they did when Amazon startes showing ads even tho when you were paying, they did when Netflix disallowed sharing and you had to pay extra.
People just suck up whatever is thrown at them and are fucking stupid.
We cant have nice things, because companies will greed and if users dont react and cancel the shit out of them they and others will continue to press more moneyjuice out of people.
Sheep don't know they are being slaughtered. We're the digital 1% and we can't make the sheep wake up.
I don’t use either but my issue with Signal is none of my friends want another application to install and they are happy with WhatApp.
Conversely, I’m happy not having a group chat app and will either text you or iMessage you. Don’t you dare ring me as I ain’t answering.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
-
provide free app at a loss
-
grow massive user base and market share
-
squeeze your userbase for every cent they're worth
Every single time. We got to solve the funding issue some how, I dont want to live in a future run by ads.
WhatsApp was not free and already had a massive user base before Facebook bought it.
Hope this will turn people to alternatives.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
I'm forced to use WhatsApp chat so I keep it installed begrudgingly. But who the fuck is using WhatsApp stories?
I use Beeper which shows me a unified view of whatsapp and Signal and others. whatsapp itself has zero permissions on my phone. I hate that I need to have it at all but Europe is deep into that. Sigh.
There was a big uproar amongst normies when the WhatsApp TOS changed......but people forget quickly and prefer convenience. That was our one chance to convert everyone over.
load more comments
(1 replies)
At least normal European people are locked into a platform that doesn't care what device you're using, unlike iMessage - so it's not all bad
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Hopefully this helps people move off of WhatsApp to Signal or something else.
Yeah like it moved them off of Xitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I wished Whatsapp wasn't a thing so much. There are so many so much better apps. Signal is so much better and it would work fine for the vast majority of people.
Unfortunately "better" varies from person to person. Signal is behind on features, e.g. WhatsApp has integration for businesses (customer support).
I hope my monthly donation will help but we must realize for some some features are important, I guess that for most it's how many ppl they know is there/unwilling to lead a migration
load more comments
(4 replies)
Facebook shit gonna do facebook shit
I’m more surprised it took them this long. Thankfully there are already many decent alternative messaging apps.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Meta has been running ads claiming no one can read your WhatsApp messages, including them. For some reason, I'm not 100% sure about this. It's hard to imagine they can resist grabbing all that data for their AI somehow.
Of course they fucking grab it. They have 45 backdoors with golden handles otherwise they're show the fucking source
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don't, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it's hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
load more comments
(13 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
I literally just got my senior citizen dad off Skype and over to WhatsApp like 2 years ago... Ain't no way I can get him over to signal
This is such great news! More ammo to use when trying to convince friends and family to move away from WhatsApp
Time to ditch WhatsApp
👆 mark that comment. I'm sure you'll write that again in a year or so
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I hate how my country (Brazil) depends so much on Whatsapp. If I could, I would uninstall that app immediately.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I forgot WhatsApp existed.
Guess its shittier now.
Mhm. Yup.
It's the go-to messagging app in my country for historical reasons.
load more comments
(5 replies)
the channels you follow
I knew they would use that info for targeted advertising
It's Facebook 101, let the users themselves tell you what they like
WhatsApp getting ads is great news! WhatsApp, and any other meta/facebook/for-profit-social-network will never be a good product. Therefore, the second best alternative is for it to be as bad as possible, so people finally change to worthy alternatives.
What is the alternative here? Don't know, perhaps Signal, though the devs are not welcoming at all. The UI is absolute shit. Looks like UI for old people, huge margins and empty space. My screen fits like 3 chats. A compact theme would take a few hours to create and vastly improve the product, but ya..
My Signal screen fits 8 chats, and looks simliar to any other messenger I've used. It's a messenger app and the UI shows messages. I wouldn't want it to show anything else.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Signal doesnt have ads...
view more: next ›