Is it time to leave WhatsApp – and is Signal the answer?

It's substituting one walled garden for another. 5 years from now Signal will be Evil Corp and everyone will have this problem all over again.

Protocol solutions that are provider-independent like Matrix or even Delta Chat are the obvious long term solutions. How long before ISPs finally realize they need to pick up the ball here?

I remember a time where the general effort was to have a common protocol and a number of inter-operable clients for chatting on the desktop. (XMPP?, not sure)

I wonder if its possible to have a common messenger format and a series of independent servers and providers that can service a variety of users, while allowing users to switch servers / providers.

Monetization will always happen, at-least we dont have to be worried about central control / censorship.

> Signal benefits from being the most similar to WhatsApp in terms of features, while Telegram has had problems as a secure and private messaging app, with its live location feature recently coming under fire for privacy infringements. Crucially, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default, instead storing your data in the cloud. Signal is end-to-end encrypted, collects less data than Telegram and stores messages on your device rather than in the cloud.

Interestingly, this reads like a hit piece against Telegram.

Also, I thought the sentiment here was that Telegram was closest to WhatsApp in terms of feature parity.