(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


feed – Dropsafe

2025-07

Imagine you have a single messenger app which brings together SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and one or two other chat apps; what would it really be like to have the same conversation 3-to-5 times over in 3-to-5 different “places” in the same interoperable “app”, but with different “platform” backends?

It would be bedlam, because…

…because each chat app or messenger tool is a separate “space”, and logically there are only two ways that you would be communicating:

Either you would be using some kind of broadcast mode to blindly shout the same commentary into all spaces and group chats simultaneously, annoying all of the other participants because you aren’t actually engaging with them, or… You would be manually resending the same message to multiple spaces, individually tuning it for each community whilst also trying to keep track of which chat you are currently looking at because all of the user experiences are superficially identical.

I’m going to be watching Eurovision tonight and it is very likely that I will be using Messenger, WhatsApp, and Signal to have different live chats with 5+ different communities.

Hell, it’s bad enough participating in 2+ separate Eurovision group chats within WhatsApp, let alone across multiple messengers within the same app where sticker packs and emoji for one do not necessarily exist in another.

Having the chats as clearly separate apps means that I will engage with those app-rooted communities as a human being rather than a unidirectional shouter of witty commentary and bantz; and it also means that I can use the diverse experiences of each distinct messenger app to better communicate with the people who are also using it.

Calls for interoperability are calls for homogeneity… which is problematic when you value diversity of user experience and of platform.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/feed
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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