Reasons for disconnecting from Messaging Apps

This is not an attempt to unplug from the rest of the world!

On the contrary, it’s an attempt to remain more connected, by reducing clutter and wasted energies.

Reasons

One declutters and cleans up their house also to make their guests feel more comfortable when they visit: so their interaction with the host’s home is more simple and easier. They don’t do it to deprive their guests from objects they can distract themselves with during their visit. Similarly, my goal is to make communications with friends and family more simple and more reliable.

With the current messaging apps, we are still far from having a system which can last, like SMS, phone, voice mail and email have. There currently are some solutions which promise to solve this problem (like https://matrix.org/ you can try out apps which work on this open network here: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now), but widespread adoption still needs to occur.

I have decided to close most of my messaging apps (including WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Signal) and reduce communication to open-standard based protocols (Telephone/VoiceMail, SMS, email) for the following reasons:

• With many apps, I am not giving the attention i would like to give to friends and family.
  • My attention to contacts from friends and family is diluted, because i have to keep monitoring several apps. It therefore becomes very easy to oversee messages.
  • If i reduce my communication time to a single (or one or two) app, i will spend more time and attention for that single app, and optimize it to receive the proper amount of notifications
• The platforms are not interoperable, they do not follow an open standard. This has the following consequences:
  • Cannot easily backup all my messages from all apps.
  • I need to use one separate app for each messaging system (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), thus requiring administration, monitoring and installation of several apps.
  • I need to rebuild the network of friends in each app from scratch.
  • I need to use different apps for different friends, and i have no easy way of knowing which app to use, for which friend, except for trial and error. Rel- ability
  • If the app developers goes offline, i lose all communication and in some cases, also my messages. Pri- acy
  • My conversations could be stored (whether encrypted or not) on the app developer’s servers, and a certain level of trust is always required.

In a few months, I will be trying out some of the Matrix compatible apps, like Element or WeeChat.

duckone version: 1.1.4