I have not found any news article on this on a whim. Because my friends and family, I need to use Facebook Messenger, and Messenger Lite was a OK client - lightweight, no unnecessary features, etc., compared to the regular Messenger app.
Now I’m a little torn, having a Meta app on my phone is already bad, but having to downgrade to the bloated Messenger app? Not sure I will make a change. What are your thoughts?
Ever since Facebook forced the separate Messenger app, I’ve refused to install it. Instead, when I see a message notification, I pop into a browser, head to Facebook.com and push the desktop version. While it’s clunky, I’ve never had to download Messenger.
Separate messaging app was the best thing they ever did. I’ve not had Facebook installed since.
Same. This will change nothing for me. I refuse their bullshit.
You’re still using their shit, just in a very inconvenient way. In fact, you’re going to their site that contains targeted ads rather than using an ad free app. What a strange hill to die on.
I have exactly one group that insists on communicating this way. Which is why this isn’t a big inconvenience for me. Your point is well taken, but doesn’t really apply in my case. I’m not a user of the service, which is why it’s so easy for me to refuse to install it, and hopefully I can use this to pressure the group to move to discord or some other means of communication. But if not I will continue to use the desktop site rather than install an app.
I’m in the exact same position as you and take the same approach. It’s a hill I’m getting a mildly stubbed toe on.
I’d rather have a slight inconvenience of seeing their ads on their website for the few moments I’d need to send a message than having their spyware of an app tracking everything I do all day long.
Not only is that not possible on both Android and iPhone nowadays, that’s a myth that’s never been remotely proven.
https://mbasic.facebook.com/ still works. It’s missing some modern niceties, but usable. That’s what I use for occasional messages.
In my head, i read this URL as https://YaBasic.facebook.com
I thought of a neck beard: “m’basic”
Why? I mean it’s much better to have the messenger app without all the facebook BS.
Its very easy to disregard facebook in 2023, but Messenger is still one of the more prominent messaging app.
https://www.messenger.com/ also works (requires to be running as desktop version). Still not ideal but works.
I hate to say this, but Facebook Messenger is one of the most fully featured messaging apps. It has its own internal messaging standard that offers iMessage like features between Facebook users, and it also is one of the better SMS apps out there.
I can see why they make it its own app, it’s supposed to replace other messaging apps.
Same here. I wish Disa messenger app was maintained as it was my one stop shop for a few messenger apps.
Is their messenger still a 150 MB monster that gets updated twice a day?
Yes, and they constantly change how parts of the UI work, most often getting more in the way of efficient actual messaging… It’s really bad.
They cut the size down to 30 MB on iOS in 2019, but they’re back to 110 since (on Android, it’s 60 MB).
EDIT: In terms of updates, they are pretty stable at one update a week on both systems.
Android 13 here, Messenger is 148mb, last update 11 days ago
I think the Facebook Lite app includes messaging too.
No… I disabled the auto updates.
I wish someone discontinued Meta
Too bad Threads hasn’t entered the Fediverse, things could’ve been easier.
I’ll die before I install Facebook Messenger
Same. Just have to hold out until the EU makes all messaging apps cross+operable and then I’ll be able to talk to everyone again.
Careful. They could be listening.
I hope they are.
Hey Facebook, eat a bag of dicks!
A whole bag of them!
And they put a notification on your phone about it that you can’t remove… this infuriates me more than it should
You’re right, I did not even notice the persistent notification! What a unnecessarily annoying move. This deserved an early bird uninstall for me…
Yeah I uninstalled as soon as I realised it was a persistent notification. Fuck that.
At least on my phone I could swipe the notification a bit to the left to reveal the cog, “disable notifications”, and disable the “standard” category of notifications.
In other news, there’s no way in hell I’m installing the full app. People texting me there will just have to wait until I’m by a computer.
Yes, but that is the same notification category as your default one for messages, so disabling it will result in no message notifications at all.
Yeah I just turned off every notification from Messenger Lite after seeing that. Next month I might just uninstall it completely, or opt for the Matrix bridge.
Another reason my phone is rooted. I want to have the final say in whether I can remove a notification or not on my phone.
I’m also on the uninstall boat with y’all, for this reason. Lucky me, I haven’t used messenger in a year so when I saw the notification didn’t hesitate. Haven’t logged on FB in years so I doubt anyone will try to reach me there.
Install Telegram (or Signal before everyone downvotes me) for your family & friends. For me most of my friends & relatives migrated to it and using for chats between themselves.
Bonus if you are good at programming and can make some very unique telegram bots that do some interesting stuff, like reporting local news.
Unfortunately FB Messenger is the defacto way to communicate in some countries - if I refused to use it I’d fail uni as I wouldn’t be able to communicate with group members, I wouldn’t be able to contact most of my family, and the number of friends I can talk to would drop to about 5 (of which most have recently had children and are thus a bit preoccupied)
I use Telegram every day, but without end-to-end encryption (by default and on groups), it’s as private as Facebook Messenger. They can read everything. The only difference is that currently people trust them more than they trust Facebook, but everything turns to shit eventually.
If Signal is too “boring” or no one uses it in your circles, try WhatsApp. Yes, it’s also from Meta, but at least comms are encrypted (same protocol as Signal) and a lot of people use it.
Messenger supports end-to-end encrypted chats, and more encryption features are rolling out. https://messengernews.fb.com/2023/08/22/expanding-testing-for-end-to-end-encryption-on-messenger/. It’s a huge project to implement encryption given the number of features that have to be rewritten (e.g. scraping URLs to show a preview picture now has to be done client-side rather than server-side)
You (op) use telegram, and make a relay bot that redirects messages to/from fb messenger. You use the app of your choice, and they use the app of theirs. Big downside, is you’re still reliant on fb for messages.
Can you even make a messenger bot? Last time I checked it had bots, but they were incredibly crappy.
I know of someone who made one a while back, but I don’t know if it would work with the current version of messenger. It’d be a fun project to figure that out, though. I’ll add it to the growing list of fun projects haha
I swear my battery life improved after I uninstalled messenger for a while and got worse after reinstalling recently.
I wouldn’t have installed it except I was in the process of getting back in touch with a few old friends. Was totally worth it for that.
I’m on the same page. I would prefer not having those apps installed or even an account, but my friends are more worth to me than my IT ideals.
It’s too bad that your friendship isn’t more important than ten minutes of inconvenience for them to install a different app or to give you their actual phone number.
I find that you’re making a lot of assumptions on my friendships based on my 4 lines comment.
I do chat with my friends via SMS or phone cause I indeed have their number. But you can’t deny that SMS for group chats is pretty gruesome.
Based on that, everybody is used to those popular chat apps and have their other group chats on them. Why would I make them change when they work for what’s intended? Privacy is the best argument, but they may not all care enough to not find it bothering. So I don’t bother ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Live and let live
They dont work for what’s intended. Its an illusion to pull money from your content and your potential ad revenue.
Thats not getting into any of the other sociological effects of a huge amount of people getting their daily news from Facebook message headlines.
It’s exactly what social media platforms, particularly Facebook, want. They want you to feel locked in because your friends are there
I don’t know why people don’t just use more SMS. You don’t need all the fancy bells and whistles, it shouldn’t change the conversation you’re having, especially with the gradual rollout of rich messages, and it has a wider audience than Facebook will ever have. More people have SMS than have Facebook
I’ve found the same thing with the IG and FB apps which is why I don’t use them. I stick to the mobile web versions but they have made it difficult to message from the android mobile web without extra steps like desktop mode. Even then there can be missing functionality.
There was also an article earlier this year where they were purposely “testing” the apps that forcibly drained some user batteries quickly without a care for the actual users affected. Since I’m often using my phone for navigation in the woods I want as much battery life as possible please.
Anyways if it wasn’t for older friends and family members I would no longer be using FB.
Certainly a argument can be made for this. For me it is the extended family and contacts from hobbies /sports. Without FB they would have completely faded out of my life. This low level method maintains a loose family connections once maintained by the senior family members that have long since passed. As for the others yes completely disappear from your life…
Of course it did. They’re tracking everything you do, and everywhere you go, even when the app isn’t running. Don’t believe me? Install the Duck Duck Go browser and enable App Tracking Protection. You will be shocked by the amount of shit so many apps track in the background, but Facebook is one of the worst.
You can use Beeper to replace all your communication apps. That way you only have to install one app, and you don’t have to have Meta installed.
It sounds like a too good to be true situation. Definitely an interesting concept though. Sounds like they use remote servers to connect to the third-party apps using your credentials and then transcribe the messages using the Matrix protocol to the app. Source here and snippet below
Beeper consists of two main components:
- A client app that runs on your devices.
- A web service run by Beeper.
… Beeper’s web service consists of a Matrix homeserver and infrastructure to run open source bridges that connect to 15 different chat networks.
Currently free but also will be a Plus version eventually rolling out, according to the FAQ
For now, everyone has access to all the features of Beeper Plus for free. At some point in 2023, we will begin charging $5-10 per month for Beeper Plus.
Also, no humor is lost on the fact that it is dangerously close to Wuph from The Office…
I signed up for beeper, but realized you can self host a matrix server that uses the same bridges between these chat services.
I was skeptical at first, but it’s been super solid and refreshing to have a single chat app for everything.
How did you do that? I’d love to set something like that up. I keep seeing Matrix mentioned everywhere, but I haven’t looked into it to see exactly what it is.
@Unsustainable @bananahammock @technology Matrix is a protocol for real time communication. Several companies build products using this protocol, including Elemental, Beeper and Rocket Chat.
This is similar to how ActivityPub is a protocol for federated social media. Many projects are built using ActivityPub, including Mastodon, PixelFed, and Lemmy.
@Unsustainable @bananahammock @technology
A “Matrix Bridge” is a computer program that connects to an arbitrary service and presents it as Matrix service. You can connect to that Matrix service with any Matrix client.
For example, this code connects LinkedIn messages to Matrix: https://github.com/beeper/linkedin
Beeper runs Matrix bridges for you as a service. If you don’t want to use that service, you can self-host the bridges.
I signed up for this month’s ago and I’m still not in. Every time I log into the app to check my waitlist, I’m some random number in the 3000s, and not always lower than last time. Why is this do you know?
If you’re technically savvy, it looks like you could self-host the application. https://github.com/beeper/self-host
I’ll take a look, cheers. Got an Raspberry Pi lying about somewhere I could use
This is what I did, took a bit to get it configured but works great once your up and running.
How long have you been running it so far? Any issues?
A few months for the Facebook and Instagram bridges and I just setup the Google messages Bridge last week.
I’ve never heard of beeper, but it sounds pretty inaccessible from what your saying. Is there something that makes it worth it? Or is it just another messaging app that nobody I need to speak with is using?
I believe Beeper is Matrix under the hood. They have just made it more accessible with a new interface and pre-installed bridges.
Just signed up myself, about 40k in line it seems. Sounds like reinventing Trillian/Gaim/Pidgin/etc…
It’s a modern take on the Pidgin concept. Pidgin ran locally on one computer and didn’t sync anything between any of your other Pidgin installs. Also, your login details for every account were usually in plaintext on disk. In practice, it feels
Beeper (really Matrix + bridges) is a network service that you can access with a browser, mobile app, whatever.
Yep, didn’t mean it to sound like I was putting it down. Sounds like a cool concept.
I was in the wait list for only 20 days, according to the email when I got in. No idea why I got in so fast but others have been waiting months.
Genuinely I just found an invite code from Google. Once you’re in the app is pretty much as advertised.
I signed up when it was first announced over a year ago. As of a couple months ago I still hadn’t gotten approved. I signed up again and within a couple days I got approved. You should try signing up again.
Why still use Facebook when we have the Internet?
Old people are there, some we care about, some have passed away…
There are a few decent communities out there too. Not many, but a few.
In many countries it’s the default communication app
The only and I say the only good thing I can say about Facebook Messenger is… umm…
Can somebody name at least one thing? Really, this app is shit but we must find one at least.
At least in Australia it’s by far the most popular messenger app. It wins by a landslide thanks to the network effect.
Because we have standards for at least 20 years for messaging I think we can’t say that networking effect is upside of some app, but rather the fact that everyone must use the same app is a downside.
Yeah, there’s no real alternative here. Use messenger or Don’t talk to people.
Yes, people using it as the main messaging app is still preferable to the situation in the US where people on different mobile platforms can’t message each other without bullshit compatibility issues and bubble colors.
At least here it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on - including desktops and the web - and as a result nobody cares.
Of course, the same is true for almost every other messaging service too, and there are better ones out there.
Back when people used Facebook, it was a convenient way to connect people to chats quickly and easily. I don’t think that’s the case anymore though.
It isn’t. Adding someone is always digging through people with the same name and searching for “that one with glasses on profile picture”. There are some codes to scan, but they are Facebook’s custom format incompatible with QR code scanners and inconvinient to use.
Facebook Messenger is probably the closest thing to a modern Yellow Pages as we have. Not everybody is on there, but most people are - even if they haven’t checked their profile in years. With the fall of landlines, it can be the easiest (or only) way to find/contact someone - especially if you’re a GenX or early Millennial because we have all dropped out landlines, but we created most of our social connections before any other messaging service existed. Heck, almost none of the people I knew from college in the 90s even had an email address that they stuck with (assuming I actually had email logs going back thirty years). It’s nice that so many message services exist, but most have no way to “look someone up” the way it’s possible to do on something like messenger/fb. (admittedly - it’s both good and bad)
I suppose there’s a chance that LinkedIn is the other major database of real names out there; I’ve never tried it for locating people.
Some of my late mum’s friends only use Facebook. Not saying it’s ideal, but… a single good thing, right?
Marketplace became the defacto replacement for craigslist in my area 😔
This sucks.
Can’t ditch it completely due to family, but got a few more contacts over on Signal after this announcement.
Just log in to Facebook on desktop every couple of days. If they want speedy responses, they will know yto try an aternative medium.
I don’t use Facebook so I don’t know -
Why can’t you just have a group text with your family.
Because SMS doesn’t support group chats and MMS is expensive garbage (50c/300kb is fucked)
Just gonna leave this here: https://www.signal.org/
Well, family at least is going to be willing to switch to signal…
I can’t uninstall the Facebook app from my phone (not unless I use ADB), so it’s disabled. I uninstalled Messenger. I pinned a post on my FB page that said if people needed to contact me they can email me or text me. I have posted about why folks should leave these platforms until I am blue in the face. If they want to make the switch, they will. If they want to reach out, they will.
Eventually, I want to get an unlocked phone, load a custom ROM, and tell the big platforms to fuck off. I resent how difficult they have made that, and I resent how complacent we have become because of it.
Most phones can be unlocked provided you own it. Easier than you might think!
Carrier unlocked and oem bootloader unlocking are two very different things.
In canada, all phones must now be free of carrier locks, but bootloader unlocking is a pain. The us version of my current phone can be oem unlocked.
Mine can’t.
So, i use a lot of adb/shizuku
If I can get a custom ROM to work on my current phone, I’m all for it! I was looking at specific unlocked phone brands because some custom ROMS are optimized for that hardware.
Check out the XDA Forums section for your carrier’s version of whatever model of phone you have. Not all carriers make it trivial (or even possible) to unlock the bootloader and flash custom recovery images, but if it’s possible then someone there has certainly done it.
Thank you for this!
My next phone will be a pixel so I can flash grapheneOS on it. I don’t think my Snapdragon S21 can run custom firmware without triggering Samsung Knox though
Your phone came with Facebook installed and you can’t uninstall it? Fucking gross! Which phone is that so I know to never buy it?
This could be true of basically any Android phone on specific carriers, at least in the US.
I guess I’ll always stick with the Pixel Pro then.
Sony for one. My Xperia One III (a fucking $1300 or whatever flagship) comes with a completely uninstallable Facebook apk
Here’s an idea. Stop using FB.
I get it, your boomer parents/grandparents don’t know how to use anything else… But you can show them. It’s very similar and doesn’t suck as much.
I understand this move from FB too… Rather than maintain two apps, that both do the same thing, just maintain one. However, without the ability to turn off all the bloat and crap in the one app to make it very similar to the other, I don’t see that being viable for many, and I’m sure they don’t let you do that, so, ha ha, get fucked.
Anyways, Facebook is a cancer.
All of my international friends use Facebook Messenger.
e-mail is an alternative, yes, but to put obstacles to how can you be contacted is how you lose touch with each other.
If I’m always going to where my friends are, and they never come to where I am, are they really my friends?
These are the questions I constantly mull over to try to figure out. It’s extremely important to me that me and my friends are on equal footing, we’re both partners in the friendship, neither is following the other’s lead. I’ve lost many friends by simply not being the first person to send a message.
To me, I’d rather have fewer friends who have me as an active part of their life, versus a lot of friends I’m constantly making concessions for that wouldn’t do the same for me.
With all that said, I’m not you and I have no control over your choices. Do what you will.
Family is not the problem, everyone else is.
Or install an app called Metal.
It’s a wrapper for the mobile webpage with all the intrusive permissions disabled by default.
I just looked for this app and it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2018. Am I wrong?
Try Hermit on Android then. You’re looking for a PWA wrapper app that lets you add them to your homescreen. Then again, your Android web browser should already have this with the “Add to homescreen” feature.
On the play store page I got the message “not available on your device, this app has been designed for an older version of Android”, not updated since June 2018 and I can’t find it anywhere else, seems you’re not
Better idea don’t install messenger at all