Moving from WhatsApp to Signal is an important action, right now. WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, has been involved in several cases of election interference: America in 2016, Trinidad and Tobago …
Signal has been a good option because you can get “normal” people to use it, which hasn’t been true for many of the alternatives (except Telegram, but that’s a mess).
The problem is that it was easier to get people to move to Telegram since it had an abundance of features compared to WhatsApp which was compelling for the average person that doesn’t care about encryption. Signal doesn’t have any of these features that make it enticing for the person.
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
The sad truth is that the majority of people are treating WhatsApp exactly as a social network. It is there to send memes and stickers. See what others are up to without having to interact. Then mindlessly scroll through reels. Ocassionally purchase something via chat with a corporate bot.
If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space
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Signal has been a good option because you can get “normal” people to use it, which hasn’t been true for many of the alternatives (except Telegram, but that’s a mess).
The problem is that it was easier to get people to move to Telegram since it had an abundance of features compared to WhatsApp which was compelling for the average person that doesn’t care about encryption. Signal doesn’t have any of these features that make it enticing for the person.
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
The sad truth is that the majority of people are treating WhatsApp exactly as a social network. It is there to send memes and stickers. See what others are up to without having to interact. Then mindlessly scroll through reels. Ocassionally purchase something via chat with a corporate bot.
If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space
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deleted by creator