Holy shit, three of the top five downloaded apps are within the Facebook ecosystem (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram).

And further down you have Messenger and WhatsApp Business, also from Facebook (I refuse to call them Meta).

That's really awful.

For good reason. Out of all the messenger apps I've tried - open source, decentralised, or stuff like whatsapp - Telegram is THE best one imo. Fast as hell, great UI/UX, lots of customisation, nice features, and good bot support.

I know some people dislike Telegram here, but among centralised apps their philosophy and track record is pretty decent imo

I logged into telegram today and found that all my data had been deleted because I hadn't used it in 6 months. Like I get why that feature might be desirable in some circumstances but for me, I'm not using end-to-end encryption because I'm sharing state secrets that need to self destruct upon opening - I just don't want the middlemen.

I've been looking into alternatives like Matrix/Element, XMPP etc - it sounds like Element might be easier to get non-techy friends to adopt but it, from my understanding, has a fairly power hungry mobile app.