You can try what my friend did, he kept spamming our old whatsapp chat with invitations to telegram until we all switched. A few of us, me included, we very reluctant to switch and held out for a while saying that whatsapp is great. Once I downloaded telegram and gave it the time of day though, I turned to love it in the course of a day and now I can't even understand how anybody uses whatsapp anymore. I could go on and list all the reasons why it's better, but I think it's simpler just to say that it's better on every front and feature(except no wifi calling, yet), and even has more features to offer than whatsapp.

I once thought we migrated most of the instant messaging world to Jabber. Now on the desktop side of things a lot of stuff switched to Hipchat, Slack, Skype and what else. On the mobile side of things we see WhatsApp, Threema, Telegram, Signal, Facebook with now some RCS thrown in between. Feels like we're back at the end of the 90s. And now fighting on two fronts for open networks. :( The only communication that stayed open all the time seems to be IRC and email.

> In this respect I really, really miss the days of Pidgin and those other similar applications...

Given that -AFAIK- Signal documents its protocols, I expect that there will be Pidgin support for it not long after the Signal desktop client moves out of population-limited beta and is officially released.

But yeah. It's a goddamn crying shame that this new crop of devs have decided to not only reinvent Instant Messaging, but to do it in such a way that leaves us back in the same situation we were in in the 1990's. [0]

That wheel keeps turning and periodically crushes us all, I guess.

[0] Of course, one could do the very same thing that was done back in the 1990's and reverse engineer the new wave of chat protocols. We still possess general purpose computers that can be used to snatch the plaintext of conversations that they're a party to that are sent over encrypted channels.