I was in the military. Chat apps made it easy to keep up with friends and family even when we weren’t all in the same country. (Poor international communications is definitely a downside of standard phone services). But all of us all are back stateside now and it’s mostly been a gradual slide towards texting for my social group.

I abandoned WhatsApp for Discord after meta got its greedy hooks into it. Do they think people won’t just make a new account elsewhere and move on? Millennials have done it every two years ever since MySpace imploded after Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch bought it. We have been conditioned to let our accounts go.

(Also text messaging, group chats, phone calls, and video calls are things that come standard on smartphones without need of an app. Texting stupid memes to everyone I know has never been easier. Maybe it’s my age, but everyone I regularly talk to on discord is also in my phone. Oh noes, I’ll have to “text” instead of “chat.” The horror.)