How have others gotten friends/family to make the switch? I’ve been doing a cleanup of my digital life over the last year or so and am trying to move to using more privacy friendly alternatives where possible.
example: I’d love to switch to Signal only but everyone I know only uses WhatsApp. I’ve mentioned switching to people in the past but it’s always the same response (I don’t have anything to hide)
It’s worse for me in my country, 90% of people use Viber. Which not only has the same lack of privacy with other popular messengers, it’s also ugly, filled with ads and company bots, and it’s obviously targeted to teenagers. It’s so weird to me that people use this app, but I guess most people’s choice is always “whatever my most contacts use”. I’ve been trying to introduce my friends to something better, I would prefer Signal but literally zero of my contacts use it. On Telegram on the other hand, I found 4-5 of my contacts already using it so I started from there, added my family too, and I’m slowly trying to add more friends. Until then, like others said, I’ll use whatever for a casual message, and I’ll just call the person for anything more personal or private.
Yeah that’s what sucks about this. But you don’t have to really call for intimate messages. WhatsApp cannot read you message since it’s E2EE but they do store and use the metadata. So a casual message and an intimate messages are the same in a WhatsApp server’s eyes.
Viber is really very annoying, constantly nagging me about their “newest stickers” and other crap. When I open it, it’s like times square on my phone with all the garbage ads…