SUMMARY
- The EU has identified WhatsApp as a gatekeeper in the messaging industry and has given it a few months to enable interoperability with other apps.
- The EU’s Digital Markets Act aims to promote fair competition and give consumers more options for alternative services.
- WhatsApp has already begun working on interoperability with other apps, potentially allowing smaller players like Signal to compete more fairly.
How does that solve communication with people that are exclusively on whatsapp?
There’s a whatsapp bridge.
I never used matrix or bridges so I don’t know what that means. Do you still need a whatsapp account? What do people using whatsapp see when you send messages to them? How does encryption work if you bridge something like signal, if there are “bridges” for other apps out there? Can i bridge viber on my phone and avoid the annoying ads that way, how reliable is it?
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
You login to your account with the bridge, so the bridge can pretend to be you.
I’ve been reading a bit about it, it sounds good in theory but I’m not sure most people are willing to selfhost (since otherwise you’re just trusting another party with your data anyway) and maintain all these bridges for something as crucial as day to day communication that should be stable. It kinda wraps it all in a single point of failure as well.
Still seems like the EU legislation could be a better option, if I can just interface with everything through signal or telegram.
Matrix is FOSS, Synapse (Matrix server) is FOSS, bridges are FOSS. The only thing stopping most people is a server that can run 24/7