It has been a long journey.
I have been gradually convincing my family, close relatives and friends to make the switch to Signal for over two years. I am already the “tech support guy” in all my circles so most didn’t really question it. Most of my friends are quite tech-savvy, and some even did use Signal before I talked to them about it.
This also filtered out some “friends” who were never that close to me to begin with. So, that’s a bonus, I guess.
Overall, my recommendation to others interested would be to tell people how much you don’t like Meta’s business model instead of the privacy aspect. I already ditched Facebook and Instagram many years ago, and this helped defend my point a bit better.
Can you expand a bit what you tell people about not liking Meta’s business model? I got some people to follow me to Signal, but only for messaging with my husband and me. They don’t really care for the privacy aspect, so I’m curious about your other arguments!
Well, some people called me paranoid and said “us regular people don’t have anything to hide” when I told them how much data Meta collects about us. Of course, this frustrated me as my threat model is very small compared to most people here.
I explained how free services where instead the user is the product work, and how much I disagree with this model. I informed them that I use FOSS almost everywhere and that they exist for the greater good of humanity.
I feel bad for Europeans or folks who need what’s app. Needing Big Tech that impeds social media into your texting app is insane.
Which Europeans need WhatsApp?
It’s definitely unfortunate that it’s a proprietary closed system owned by big tech. On the other hand, SMS/MMS is a pretty bad user experience by comparison, and it’s unencrypted.
I’ve done it quietly 4y ago, only told some closer relatives. It was kind of funny when relatives I wasn’t talking to told my closer ones that we were keeping in touch on WhatsApp, not even aware I wasn’t in the platform for over 6 months at that point.
Now after years and leaving 2 family groups, politics, and a whole lot of drama behind, I feel it was a great decision, and the only regret was not doing it earlier.
In my country nowadays you can’t even contact companies and services through regular phone number, you gotta message them on Whatsapp, and I mean, you use Whatsapp to talk with the guy from your neighborhood that fixes roofs to international banking institutions.
This is something I didn’t realize until I traveled outside the US. In some places, WhatsApp is the default.
I’ve always been very anti-Meta, and refused to get on WhatsApp until I ran into that situation.
Something that needs to be reversed as soon as possible.
It’s cool because online based chats have more features but are more susceptible to enshittification. A federated, online based, encrypted open standard like Matrix is the future.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually used WhatsApp. An old boss tried to tell me that it was mandatory for my job (there was a group chat where management insisted on tracking every single thing we did). Fortunately, Ontario has somewhat decent labour laws where if you’re required to use an app or something on your phone, your employer now gets to pay for your phone bill! Needless to say, she backed off pretty quick lol
Also, the concept of NEEDING WhatsApp for daily life is wild to me. It’s not the norm for businesses, banks, etc to require it, and if someone says they do, it’s probably a scam here…
WhatsApp has significant market dominance in Europe, to the point that only one or two people I know who live on that continent don’t use it. If you give someone your phone number in Europe, they will almost certainly send you a WhatsApp message, not an SMS.
It’s not a need in the sense that you’ll die without it, but not having it adds significant friction to social relationships.
And to think in ~6 months you’ll probably need to go through that whole song and dance again when you switch them to Matrix 😔
🎖️
I need sometimes to create Whatsapp account for some purpose then I’m deleting it.
eversince i started using beeper im contempt HAAHAHH all my messaging needs in one app running on device<33 (would love if it’d be foss but it is what it is)
The problem with universal clients like that is that it inherently breaks encryption, shares it with a third party, and then MAYBE re-encrypts it correctly. And it does not prevent the third parties like Discord or whatnot from having access to your messages just because you run it through Beeper. It still goes through them. It’s not even particularly more convenient. You still have to create an account with the other provider, and often times this can only be done by downloading the app.
So there are a lot of downsides, and the only upside is not having as many apps installed, and I doubt you’re hurting THAT bad for storage.
