Seems perfectly safe and scriptless to me, but I understand the caution.
Summary is that in South America, Africa and South Asia among others have huge parts of their economic, healthcare, disaster response and even government functions running on it. WhatsApp Pay and WhatsApp for business communication (particularly small businesses), doctors coordinating over large distances, Syria’s White Helmets (serving as replacement for defunct emergency services), migrants communicating with families, migrant workers making sure the payment they sent home arrives properly…
In all those places and for all those people, WhatsApp shutting down would cause disastrous disruptions. Even during previous outages of a few hours, smaller businesses lost a lot of money.
The knock-on effects would probably be felt world-wide. WhatsApp has managed to worm its way into so many important places that the dependency is hard to break, much like Instagram has become an important platforms for small businesses to market themselves. And a sudden mass-migration to Signal or Telegram might overload their servers, if they’re not built to handle the same scale. Matrix is technically more complicated for smaller businesses that can’t easily redirect internal resources or hire external contractors or service providers.
The ones least affected by such a shutdown would be the bigger companies with more resilient infrastructure, redundant alternative systems and the capacity to quickly roll out other tools (such as setting up matrix servers).
This dependency on a central service would be a terrible risk, even if it were the most good-natured, honest, charitable organisation running it. We both know Meta is far worse.
Signal is a better option… Or set up a matrix server…
Yes, of course it would be, but if you read the article, you’ll know why it’s not that easy.
That link is sketchy as fuck…no preview means my router is filtering it has high risk… Not going near it.
Seems perfectly safe and scriptless to me, but I understand the caution.
Summary is that in South America, Africa and South Asia among others have huge parts of their economic, healthcare, disaster response and even government functions running on it. WhatsApp Pay and WhatsApp for business communication (particularly small businesses), doctors coordinating over large distances, Syria’s White Helmets (serving as replacement for defunct emergency services), migrants communicating with families, migrant workers making sure the payment they sent home arrives properly…
In all those places and for all those people, WhatsApp shutting down would cause disastrous disruptions. Even during previous outages of a few hours, smaller businesses lost a lot of money.
The knock-on effects would probably be felt world-wide. WhatsApp has managed to worm its way into so many important places that the dependency is hard to break, much like Instagram has become an important platforms for small businesses to market themselves. And a sudden mass-migration to Signal or Telegram might overload their servers, if they’re not built to handle the same scale. Matrix is technically more complicated for smaller businesses that can’t easily redirect internal resources or hire external contractors or service providers.
The ones least affected by such a shutdown would be the bigger companies with more resilient infrastructure, redundant alternative systems and the capacity to quickly roll out other tools (such as setting up matrix servers).
This dependency on a central service would be a terrible risk, even if it were the most good-natured, honest, charitable organisation running it. We both know Meta is far worse.