I continue to have individual conversations on signal with most friends, but the idea of being able to leave whatsapp seems to be much tougher than I thought.
I cut all of FB and their ecosystem out of my life years ago. Can’t say this one person out of billions has had an effect on the company but at least I can honestly say I’m not even a tiny part of the problem.
I don't proselytize to normal people anymore because most just aren't receptive to the message. It's like an addiction. Even when they agree with me, everyone has their little excuses as to why they can't possibly quit. And at the end of the day your one-one-billionth share of the problem amounts to peanuts, anyway.
well, it requires sacrifice on your part to stop messaging your friends. Most people would not give up their friends for "the greater good" of stopping privacy intrusion (which won't have an effect until the majority of people give up whatsapp first).
I can see why most people won't fight the good fight.
If anything, leaving Facebook was a wake-up call as to who my very good friends were.
I strongly believe that platforms like Facebook and Twitter are extremely harmful to social cohesion and mental health.
i don't care what or how your life is - this discussion is about the general case. Not everyone has a rich social life, and these messaging apps/services do help people engage with others which would otherwise have not.
And to change can be disruptive - casually dismissing these concerns is not the way to solve the problem connected with these platforms.
Please try and be a little kinder.
I'm not dismissing these concerns. The social harms of these platforms far outweigh whatever gains are wrung from them. They are a net negative to society and to public discourse, full stop. The longer we defend the legitimate reasons people have to stay netizens of these platforms, the darker their shadow weighs over our consciousness.
My country has a former prime minister on Facebook's oversight board because everyone here uses Facebook. That's not in anyone's interest but Facebook's because now it's convinced us that it can be brought to heel, as if it was Facebook, the company, that was the problem.
That's a treacherous misdiagnosis: the issue is the platform itself. It must be dismantled if society is going to heal from the psychic traumas unknowingly and knowingly caused by our participation.
The migration to Signal has two parts: start using Signal, and delete your Facebook accounts.
Given Signal's behavior, I am not going to waste any friendship capital trying to convince my friends to switch to Signal.
[0]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/send-payments-in-india-with-whatsa...
I think if those platforms made some story-like feature, I'd have an easier time leaving WhatsApp.
For me it's the other way around.
I've stopped using all platforms which offers that "feature", because I find it distracting and annoying.
Network lock-in is real. I think a lot of people who disconnect from fb also disregard the difficulty. Even if you don't like the barman, your local is wherever your buddies hang out.
Though I'll admit, getting people to switch to Signal was a lot of work. People like Elon and Joe Rogan helped onboard a lot of the people that were holding out. One group chat has a member that is only there because everyone else bought in and he complains, but uses it (big WA user).
I don't think people calling for disconnecting are unaware of the difficulties. Ripping off a bandaid hurts, but the thought of ripping it off often is more painful than the actual experience.
I noticed something very similar. About 25% of one-on-one conversations are now in Signal. Another 25% are in iMessage, which is a very easy sell for iOS users.
I've had a terrible time with group chats. One large chat is occurring in iMessage (very poor experience). Another large chat is occurring in Discord, which has been fantastic, but it changes the dynamic and caused a few friends to ghost (the onboarding to Discord is harder for newcomers vs. iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal IMO).
It is reasonable to assume that every single chat and every single DM is logged in plaintext by Discord for all time.
When was this? There was a migration from groupv1 to groupv2 which could explain it. I've always found it stable personally (including during migration). At any rate, it should be better now that there are less changes.
Given Signal's recent changes in direction, I'm considering just giving up on it and sticking with WhatsApp.
The difference with me is that my server has a dozen users and I could rebuild the whole thing from backups on a brand new provider in a couple hours if I needed to. I doubt I'll need to, though. It's not exactly working hard. :D