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?
You can use Facebook Lite instead of the main Messenger app if you want to. It’s got messaging integrated into it.
For now…
I doubt Facebook Lite is going anywhere - it’s needed in poorer regions where very old phones are used. Lite renders a lot of its UI on a server (similar to how Opera Mini works) which is how it’s so lightweight.
Or install an app called Metal.
It’s a wrapper for the mobile webpage with all the intrusive permissions disabled by default.
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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
Welp that’s not happening, so long Myspace, I mean book of faces
This might be a bit annoying. On my Realme phone, no amount of setting changes stops it from killing Messenger randomly. It didn’t kill Lite so I could trust it, and put up with it despite its issues.
I have personally made a switch to Delta Chat, and will be e-mailing people from now on. I will be checking facebook occasionally, as I face the same issue as others in this thread: Facebook is the default communication tool in my country. However, I have told everyone I’m connected with, that I no longer have a mobile app for facebook communication on my phone, and will only respond swiftly og they use e-mail or SMS. Let’s see how that goes.
you can go 1 step further and try to use signal, It’s much more convenient.
Your contacts would all need to sign up on Signal as well, while they already have an e-mail address.
At least use messenger with vanced patches to get rid of all the ads in conversation view.
Are you using video/audio call functionality? If not, get on the beeper waiting list. It supports connecting to facebook messenger, but it doesn’t support video/audio calls.
NIce! Thanks :)
Does it support image attachments sent via Messenger?
Yes, all file attachmemts. See chart here.
Some quirks that I think are notable:
- you can’t create new FB chats. To message someone, you must have already messaged them in the past. You can’t make group chats, but can reply to existing ones.
- There isn’t a thumbs up button like on facebook. I just add a thumbs up emoji reaction to the comment as a replacement. If the other person thumbs up’s, it comes through as an image.
- the above linked table mentions no support for “captioned media messages”. I’m not sure what that means (is it snapchat style image with text over it?) or how to do it but maybe this matters for you
Otherwise FB messenger is one of the better supported platforms on beeper in terms of feature support.
Ah, that’s excellent and just what I need. I’ll probably self host in the next two months.
Just remember the client itself is proprietary (as their business model will be client features), but the bridges are open source.
So you can self-host a facebook bridge and matrix server, but you’ll need to connect to it from a matrix client. You can’t do it from the beeper applications.
The Beeper application is a fork of element, but you should be able to use any matrix client. In the past I’ve self-hosted the facebook bridge and successfully used it with Element so don’t let it put you off 🙂
Thank you for the tip, I’ll sign up. I occasionally use the audio call functionality, but shouldn’t be an issue.
What keeps this from being blocked by the service providers like any other third party app?
Probably nothing. I haven’t heard of other apps being blocked. But Beeper has been running for like a couple of years now (but recently changed to a freemium model, before it was subscription only and had some people had been on the waiting list for a year+, they said they are aiming to get down to no wait in the next 3 months, and that was probably a month or two ago).
If you think it’s at risk of being blocked, that doesn’t mean you can’t make hay while the sun is shining 🙂
At least for third party WhatsApp clients, they have tended to go down by not only seizing to work, but with WhatsApp temporarily blocking any account connecting from them.
I’m curious if there’s a solution not so much for convenience on android, but it would be a game changer for Linux phones where WhatsApp and Facebook messager is not available at all except in the web interfaces. :)
It seems Whatsapp wants to keep their secure image, and doesn’t allow third party apps. Your only choice is basically to give the third party app your login details, which is against the Ts & Cs.
Facebook provides a way to authorise third party apps and grant them access to your data. It seems to be a different end goal, and I couldn’t find anything about facebook banning peoples accounts or even blocking third party apps.
Yeh, it works pretty great. And they’re working hard to cut the waiting time down.
Just gonna leave this here: https://www.signal.org/
Well, family at least is going to be willing to switch to signal…
Lots of options aside from Facebook.
Not if you need to communicate with people who use facebook.
Lots of options for other people
/s
Not if it’s them that need to communicate with me.
Matrix with a facebook messenger bridge? I know just the one finnish instance that offers bridging (pikaviestin.fi), though. I host my own home server.
This probably won’t work for long since they’re rolling out E2EE for Messenger.
It works with whatsapp.
Oh so it’s just basically a different UI over WhatsApp?
No. Due to how whatsapp works, you have to have a phone with whatsapp installed, somewhere.
The matrix bridge connects to that, and “puppets” your account, bringin those chats into your matrix account.
Matrix can bridge to a ton of different chat services, but each one can work a little differently. They usually don’t support voice and video.
Matrix is what’s behind the scenes for beeper, for example.
Ahh gotcha. Sounds neat!
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Wow. Rough.
It’ll be a good excuse to make anyone who wants to talk to you, use something else.
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No
Well, at least the full app has the opt-in E2EE chats.
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.
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.
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
We found the american, no one outside of USA still uses SMS.
And we definitely do not want the “rich messages”Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp are fine, as for privacy how exactly are SMS better?
Not even iPhone users use SMS lol, they use an app!
Everyone outside of the U.S. almost assuredly still has SMS capabilities, it’s just not common utilized because everyone is already on WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s where their friends are, locking them into the ecosystem, which is exactly what I just said. And I would be willing to wager the only reason WhatsApp really got huge was because SMS hasn’t always been free to use and may still not be free in some countries and with some plans.
Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp are fine, as for privacy how exactly are SMS better?
I wasn’t speaking to privacy specifically, but where all your friends are.
If you want privacy, then you shouldn’t be using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp anyway, considering both are owned by Meta and their privacy track record is shaky at best.
Signal is a great choice, but we get back to the main point where not everyone is on Signal, and once you are on Signal you’re locked in to using Signal and must have their app to participate in the conversation.
My point wasn’t that SMS is better, but it’s simpler and more widely available and doesn’t require a standalone application to use.
Ideally we would use an open standard like the Matrix standard to communicate, that way you can download whatever application you want and have all the privacy you could ever desire, but not have to download some random messaging application just to catch up from Gary from primary school
I wish matrix would catch on too. Basically every non US app is still tied to a damn phone number for auth, so it’s not better than sms for mobility anyway.
I’m not on board with sms being a better service in general, but it’s kind of difficult to argue that other messaging services are superior when sms is the only one designed to be accessible without internet access.
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.
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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…
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.
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?
Sony for one. My Xperia One III (a fucking $1300 or whatever flagship) comes with a completely uninstallable Facebook apk
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.
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
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
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!
Who tf uses messenger
At least a billion people
Who tf uses messenger
Facebook Messenger is the 2nd largest chat/messaging client behind Whatsapp, also a Meta service.
Over 3 billion users combined.
So, to answer your question: “Nearly everybody.”
Over 3 billion users combined.
So, to answer your question: “Nearly everybody.”
That’s overly dramatic, we’re over 8 billion already… so it’s “Nearly half of everybody” 😜
Living in western Europe I would have said no one, but in most of central and eastern Europe is strictly necessary to reach anyone.
Only the stupidest of humanity.
Well, there goes central Europe
Everyone in my family 😞
Ask them to go physically to your house if they ever need to tell you something urgent. If they refuse to, good riddance
Considering I live 2000 miles away from them and do not want them randomly showing up at my door, no thanks lol.
Oh ya I’ll just tell my grandparents to drive 10-12 hours to get to the other side of the island every time they want to talk to me or see my face
@cnnrduncan @csolisr My grandparents are on Signal 🤷
Incredibly based grandparents
Texting still exists.
Being spied on by facebook, microsoft, and google is not worth the risk to me personally.
Again, who tf uses messenger?
In our country, texting (through the built-in Messenger app) is mostly done as an emergency measure, as most people here use Meta’s other messaging app, WhatsApp.
Again, who tf uses messenger?
The entire nation of Poland
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Wait you’re not an entire nation are you?
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You’d rather be spied on by your carrier… Got it.
Carrier can’t spy on you if iMessage and signal!
Which are both not SMS/texting. I know iMessage falls back to SMS if the number doesn’t have iMessage, which is where the carrier spying comes in.
Instead for iMessage, it’s Apple spying, and for signal it’s… Shrug
I trust iMesssge’s e2e and Apple’s privacy a fuckovalot more than anything Facebook has ever made.
That’s fine. I trust Google’s chat app more than SMS, and others, it’s all personal preference. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that no matter what you’re using, someone has your data and is likely selling it.
If you trust apple enough to use their service, all the power to you. If you trust signal/telegram/element/whatever, that’s cool too. But no matter what service you’re using, if it’s a free public service, your data is the product. It is, in all likelihood, being sold to someone somewhere.
It’s a personal choice for how much risk you’re willing to accept on that front. Bluntly, I don’t think anyone should trust FB or any of suckerberg’s properties. Everyone else is varying levels of shit. Some much worse than others… The decisions made beyond that point are personal.
And frankly, if someone almost exclusively uses FB messenger, it says to me that they don’t give any shits about their data or what happens to it. Everything else, meh. There’s good and bad from most companies, some are doing better (signal, as an example, seems to be doing pretty good), others, not so great… Meh.
Better them than companies who advertise to me directly
I don’t use either one, for very obvious reasons
Fair enough.
Personally, I don’t like using 30 year old technology to communicate. I avoid phone calls and I generally avoid SMS and it’s derivatives.
I work in IT and generally demand more from my messaging apps. I still avoid FB like the plague though.
They all have phone numbers you can text and they don’t need to install another app or sign up for anything at least. But I understand when they prefer it and you have a fb account anyways.
Good luck sending photos or holding a video call with the scant 1100 bits provided by an SMS message…
RCS is our last hope…
AFAIK that unfortunately requires using Google Messages (or moving overseas)
I believe they’ve (Google) been somewhat successful in convincing carriers / 3rd party OS devs like Samsung to start implementing RCS in their own messaging apps. There’s even a 3rd party app on iOS that can use it now.
Definitely not. Devs have been asking for an RCS API in Android for ages, and Google hasn’t added it.
Sharing media over MMS is a garbage experience. I would need to convince them to use something reasonable, which is a lost cause.
Same.
Australians apparently. That’s what my cousins said as the explanation for why their family chat was on Facebook.
Messenger is the most popular messaging app in Australia by far. #2 is Apple/Facetime (which is about equal with WhatsApp in terms of market share) but there’s a huge gap between #1 and #2.
Facebook is the main social media in Africa. It’s not a bommer thing there, everyone use it.
Africa makes more sense. Imperialist nations want to influence the entire continent if possible.
USA, China, and Russia are all vying over the global-south like vultures
Would beeper be a better solution for you? Self-hosted beeper, and a matrix client on your phone.
ATM beeper Facebook bridge works fine. Use it daily. I’d prefer to self host beeper/matrix/bridges but haven’t had time to set it up and got an invite to beeper a few weeks ago.
Can you pass any guides on how to do this?
But this means people will continue to use that network. It’s not desiderable for me
