Post photo: various messengers | © Thomas Ulrich on Pixabay
No, this is not, as one might assume, about the NASA space probe to Mercury, which was launched on August 3, 2004 and crashed on Mercury on April 30, 2015 after the end of the mission. And it's not about the sad certainty that even today the messenger of bad news is held responsible for it; there is even a separate metaphor for this: “Shooting the messenger”.
This blog post is solely about the various messenger services, which are also often referred to as instant messengers. My first real messenger was Skype or Whatsapp and I still use it today.
There are now many of them, and they are always really successful. Over the years I have tried others besides Skype such as ChatSecure, Delta Chat, ICQ, Signal, Threema and Wire. Then there is the good old e-mail and SMS via mobile phone.
In the meantime, I have decided to further reduce my availability via a wide variety of messenger services.
It was exciting for me which communication channels I will continue to maintain, at least for the time being. Email and SMS are very convenient and will continue to be used by me. I still reach people from the early days of this messenger via Skype, so this service actually has something nostalgic for me. I only communicate with one other person via Delta Chat, which I also use for encrypted e-mail. However, this communication channel is important to me personally and will continue to be used.
I have now replaced all other messengers with Threema, and since most of my conversation partners have different messengers like me, they will probably reach me via Threema over time.
What is interesting is that I keep getting emails from the senders complaining that they have sent me messages via messenger services that I don't use at all and I don't reply to their messages. I suspect that these messages will simply find their way into digital nirvana.
All messengers mentioned here can be used for group conversations in addition to direct communication with another person; however, it can happen that other people simply add you to a group with people who are completely unknown to you.
Interested parties can find my Skype availability in the corresponding blog post and my Threema ID right here (HS82SV7E) or in the imprint. If you are interested in Delta Chat, you can reach me there chat@kuemmerle.name.
Finally, a note: I assume that all of my readers know why I don't always communicate using the currently most popular instant messengers.
There are supposed to be transitional services that offer forwarding between different messenger services. It's better not to do that - see "time thieves".