加我微信
Watch this guy in France begging Tencent to extend their service to France. Wechat is probably the worlds largest social network. Sure, Facebook has more registered users, but Wechat users are much more active, and rely on Wechat for payments, maps, and a lot of other functionality. It was the way I received my first salary in China, the way to pay for a snack from a street vendor, send a tip to a street musician, and the way one collects contact information from any new friend or colleague. It’s a nice piece of software, however it looks like the TenCent CEO didn’t take that guys advice and instead made it harder for everyone to use wechat.
So what’s the problem? Well a few months ago, Wechat quietly ended their web service. There is now no way to access the network with a browser!!
This is sad not only because now it’s much harder to use wechat and share files from the desktop, but also because it represents in some sense the death of the world wide web. Yes, people are returning en mass to the mid 1980s model of installing software from individual companies for everything instead of using a browser, making everything take up more space, more memory, and making everything less secure. This change also breaks all third party links to wechat that I know of, such as electronic-chat and rambox.
Particularly of interest is the language in the error message when you try to log in:
“To protect your account, logging in via the web has been suspended. Use wechat for windows or wechat for mac to log in from a PC.”
Note the similarity here to Nixon’s infamous 1971 speech announcing that the federal reserve note would no longer be guaranteed to be worth any amount of gold:
“I have directed the Secretary of the Treasury to take the action necessary to defend the dollar against the speculators.
The idea that forcing us to use either malware or malware could “protect our accounts” is similar to the idea that removing all backing of value for a currency might protect its value. Basically they are telling us that they are dumping water on us to keep us dry.
So, what are we to do? Well we could run a windows VM just for wechat, but that requires some fiddling to get file transfers working from outside the VM so isn’t ideal. We could also use scrcpy to control our phone from the desktop, but that requires a usb cable. It turns out that using the windows emulator Wine (and WineHQ and using winetricks to install the fonts we need), we can get the windows app going semi-natively. Make sure to set the locale properly so that CJK fonts are activated with LC_ALL="zh_CN.UTF8" wine WeChat.exe or similar, and you should be back in business. It’s much harder and still less secure than the web interface, but at least we can still drag and drop files and such.
Edit: Best Solution to Date (August 2023)
Even better is to use this package from the folks at Ubuntu Kylin OS, which installs immediately with no tinkering and works like a charm on the latest Kubuntu for me and older versions for a colleague. Thanks!
“软件介绍
微信 作为一款国民级APP，已经成为我们日常生活中不可或缺的一部分。但是，目前 Linux 发行版下的微信替代方案，都与原生版本有一定的差距，极大的影响了用户的日常工作效率，以及日常影音娱乐需求。为了进一步丰富完善优麒麟用户的生态需求，提供更顺畅的沟通交流环境，麒麟软件与腾讯公司联手推动了基于Linux平台的原生微信适配工作，微信官方版2.1.1正式上线，并在麒麟软件商店上架。想要体验的用户，只需在麒麟商店搜索“微信”，一键完成安装，扫码登录即可随时畅聊。”
In the end, perhaps it’s a good thing that wechat has abandoned the web, and the Tencent guys are just trying to prod us in the right direction: Don’t completely rely on our centralized service you fools!
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