I don’t like this feature at all. In fact, I actively dislike it when people send voice messages. However, I do understand they’re necessary to attract the mass market.

I have a friend who insists on sending voice messages most of the time. It’s difficult because I may be working or outdoors or something, and therefore unable to listen to the message. It may be important, but I have no way of knowing. Whenever I get a voice message when out and about, I have 3 options:

1. Assume it’s unimportant and leave it for later (not the nicest thing to assume for a friend).
2. Assume it’s important and worry about it until I get a chance to listen to it.
3. Assume it’s important and drop whatever I’m doing to listen to it (hope I brought headphones that I can fish out of my bag, or I have to hold my phone loudspeaker to my ear on the noisy subway like a douche).

Whenever she sends something in text form, I breathe a sigh of relief as I’m generally able to read it quickly regardless of what I’m doing. Not only that, but I can search the text of it later on - maybe she was sending me a street address, imagine how crappy that would be in a voice message. I’d either have to remember it (not happening, could be days), awkwardly scrub through the recording later to find the address, or copy it out while listening to the message. Am I expected to preemptively keep Notes open to jot down essential info that may or may not be in the voice message? Smartphones only recently gained the ability to split screen apps, what the heck did people do a few years ago? Listen to the voice message, pause, switch to notes app, write info, switch to messaging app, unpause, repeat? That’s so unnecessarily crappy.

Sending voice messages is disrespectful and lazy. You emburden the recipient and force them to do extra work because you can’t be bothered to type out what you want to say. Sending a voice message implies you value the recipient’s time less than your own, especially when the voice message is filled with pauses, "um"s and "err"s, or even the dreaded “…hold on, I need to think about it, I’ll send another voice note in a few secs” that often comes after an incoherent ramble. If nothing else, using text messages forces us to collect our thoughts up front and express them clearly. It’s the polite thing to do; people are taking time out of their day to read our messages, the least we can do is make it easy for them.

Rant over. Nice work on the new feature.

Federation with Mastodon would be interesting. Unsure how it would work though, the posting styles are completely different.