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| Image Credit: Gerd Altmann, Pixabay |
In an attempt to show solidarity against Mark Zuckerberg's failure to contain his own Frankenstein's Monster, I boycotted Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, the 3 big apps owned by Facebook. Here's how each boycott went:
This was by far the easiest to boycott. I barely use it outside of chatting with my Dad. I'd imagine this would be harder for some people, but my friends don't really use WhatsApp. Overall, the app doesn't have many unique features and isn't particularly useful compared to other chat apps, like Signal, Telegram, or even Messenger.
Cutting out Facebook didn't affect me outside of losing Messenger. My Facebook feed has very little going on in it. I think it's due to my demographic being primarily focused on Instagram. I'm 26, turning 27 soon, and many people my age don't post on Facebook anymore. They're either on Twitter or Instagram, and a few, lately, have joined TikTok.
Losing Messenger hurt. I chat with a number of friends using Messenger. Android is in a strange place with messaging in 2020. iPhones still make up a huge portion of the smartphone market and a surprising number of iOS users don't understand that iMessage's enhanced picture and video messaging are not present with standard SMS messaging. They really should put a warning saying "Hey, if you send this video, it won't come out good!" Unfortunately, this has made sending pictures and videos with friends a bit more complicated than it should be. Group messaging also suffers, since not everyone has the same 2-3 messaging apps, leading to MMS group chats that are simply unbearable at times.
iMessage also added in "reacts" a few years ago. Reacting to messages, for those that don't know, allows you to attach a reaction a a person's message. For example, if I say something funny, a friend might send a laughing emoji reaction. It's pretty cool, except when used cross-platform. When trying to send a reaction to an Android user, the react is sent as a text message, disrupting the flow of the conversation. This strategy is very Apple. By making the experience worse for the Android user and seamless for the iOS user, it'll convince the Android user to switch to iOS. In theory, iOS users could turn off iMessage and experience the same pain as an Android user, but no one would do that, since iMessage is one of the few features to purchase an iPhone for.
What does any of that have to do with Messenger by Facebook? It's one of the few messaging services that even iOS users will have installed. Most people don't use Signal (my personal favorite) and many are resistant to installing another messaging app. I can see why, there's too many at this point and none of them have the most important feature of them all: a large user-base. This can be frustrating for Android users especially, since they're the ones that end up with low quality videos/pictures sent from iOS users who can't be bothered to deal with Android's problems (caused by Apple). Thus, I had to switch to simply texting people instead of using Messenger. This was fine except for one of my group chats. I tried convincing them to switch to Signal, but received a lukewarm response. I expected that, and admittedly broke my boycott several times just to continue chatting with this group, albeit at a decreased amount.
Other than that, Facebook the site itself isn't impossibly hard to boycott.
Instagram, on the other hand, was much more difficult. Instagram is extremely popular and one of the main ways I communicate with friends. I found myself missing out on a lot of status updates. I was also unable to post my artwork. It's a pretty big hit for an artist, since we make art and love to show it to other people. I found that when I'd come back every now and again, I had missed content people sent me. Overall, I think Instagram is by far the hardest to boycott due to its high user base, DM capabilities, and general trendiness.
Overall
My big takeaway is that Facebook is very difficult to boycott if you have friends, and I'd argue that there are very few alternatives that have big enough user bases to allow for a seamless transition. Facebook truly owns the entire social media space outside of Twitter or TikTok, and Tik Tok has its own security concerns, while Twitter is overrun with political discourse, making it difficult to enjoy status updates from friends.
Facebook really should not own Instagram, they should probably be competitors. But we live in a world with very little federal regulation, especially regarding technology. But that's for another blog post.
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