Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
It’s chaos. Well, unless you count SMS.
There really isn’t a single dominant app/service, though apple and imessages comes close. But, since that’s apple only, it doesn’t truly dominate in the way whatsapp does in some places.
In my local area (a rural mountain zone in the Southeast), the most common single one is telegram. The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
County wide, it’s still Facebook over telegram, but not by much. Then imessage. You can even rely on apple monkeys using one or both of the others since the county school system sends on both of them as well as via SMS for major events.
My kid and most of the high school kids do discord among themselves, but still use the others away from that.
Tbh, though, I have come to prefer not having a single messaging service be dominant. It was (and still can be) a pain in the ass using multiple apps, but at least you’re not totally fucked if you refuse to use whatever else the majority have decided to use because it’s easier.
The only thing that gets close is Facebook messenger, but there was a big push maybe three years ago to get people away from it, and it worked.
Who led the push?
There was a huge problem with it being over used by the mayor’s office as a semi official channel. When the mayor got himself into a bit of trouble, those folks that were working to get him ousted made a big deal out of him corporatizing the office of mayor and town business in that way, and it made sense to use it as a tool against him. He was trying to treat it like if he said something there, it was a done deal, and it counted as some kind of replacement for posting such things publicly.
The push was from a group of like minded residents that included the county sheriff, the chief of police, myself, and the librarian. I can’t truly say anyone led the push, though the librarian would come closest. We all just got sick of him, and used what we could to get people moving against him. People were starting to hate Facebook locally because of some school drama anyway, so it was easy enough to stoke that fire.
Get people from the various town departments to stop using it, get their families and friends to help convince them if they weren’t on board. If he can’t reach anyone via messenger that’s part of the local government, it cuts that out, and ties him into the whole arguments over school aged access to Facebook in general.
It worked! Which was a bit of a surprise to all involved. But it was the right confluence of events. He was fucking up with covid issues, fucking up the people that actually run the town on a direct basis, and doing so while being an asshole as a person. There was no way he was winning the next election, but he could fuck things up before then.
Once the entire police force officially abandoned messenger, it was a bit of a death knell. Individual officers still used it, but the group chats he was using died totally.
Small town drama, in other words.
