Honestly after what Signal pulled with hiding their server code for a year to implement mobilcoin and still not releasing some parts of their code, Im fine with WhatsApp
Never mind that Facebook and Google are awful, user-hostile companies and neither Mozilla nor Signal has done anything even close to as bad.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Why does the alternative need to be immaculate in order for you to drop a bad company?
no, it makes the people who recommends the switch (to their non-tech friends) look bad. The majority of people don't care about these sorts of issues regarding privacy or open-ness. "Normies" care about the usability, reliability and speed.
I had convinced a few (non-tech) friends who used to use whatsapp to switch over to Signal. Then signal went down, and they immediately switched back, and that downtime made it look like i made a bad recommendation. Signal also has a bigger spam problems than whatsapp (you get these fake Amazon people trying to spam/phish you on signal, which never happened with whatsapp). I will no longer be trying to get people onto signal, not because i don't like signal (i use it myself with friends that do remain), but alas, whatsapp is still the "main" messaging app.
So in all, the dominance of whatsapp is due to their reliability and momentum - no amount of privacy intrusion is going to change that. So signal needs to up their game, but i fear the opportunity has passed already.
That said, Re: downtime, I've been using Signal for years now with non-techie family, and I've never had any complaints from them outside of that one two-day window. Signal is doing remarkably well even today. It seems like they just failed to adapt to the massive spike in load they had that week.
> Honestly after what Signal pulled with hiding their server code for a year to implement mobilcoin and still not releasing some parts of their code, Im fine with WhatsApp
Is Signal perfect? No. But overall, it's not bad, and if we compare them to the average mobile phone app filled to the brim with dark patterns and tracking to the point where Apple felt the desire to build an entire feature to prevent this, they're almost mother Theresa.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
But in this, I'm not so sure he was right. He let his penchant for being contrarian and dislike of religion get the better of him. Not the only time this happened.
Any more reason for this other than a psychological evaluation of Hitchens? He made an argument, you can speak to it. Is it a complicated objection that can't be summarized?
Hitchens not infrequently exaggerated some alleged crimes or misconduct from religious figures unfortunately. He usually had it by the right end of the stick in the general view IMHO, but could be sloppy on details. Classic case of "say something with enough confidence and people will believe you, especially if it confirms their preconceived notion" (in this case, religion=bad).
I totally get why the downtime turned a lot of people off, but that's not what GP identified as what drove them to be "fine with WhatsApp".
I have been using Signal for a long long time, right after they dropped their dual messenger approach. My trust was high in them where I used to bug my contacts to move to Signal.
For me hiding the server code ( parts are still hidden ), adding in mobilcoin, promising an AMA on reddit to explain and then cancelling it has broken trust, 2 day outage with zero explanation and more so I wasted so much tech influence to get people over, only to have them move back has made me meh about Signal. Facebook might have taken a few years to abuse its power, Signal took far less time while pretending to be high n mighty.
Oh and those recent 'facebook ads' scheme. At least be truthful that your account has not blocked because of the ads. If they are so shady about basic things, cant trust em with the big things.
Because of network effects. The status quo have your contacts, so an alternative must be that much better to convince anyone to join.
This along with the parent post, are red flags.
They've also not categorically dismissed F-Droid; just given a list of things they need it to do first. Some of those have been resolved by now, some are unlikely to be any time soon.
To be successful, Whatsapp's replacement, whatever that is, should be perceived as not a huge leap but have the right ingredients for people to naturally switch (think Unix worse-is-better philosophy), or just come with lots of positive, not negative, associations. "X is evil" is just not doing it for a lot of people.
The most resistance I get is "I already use A,B,C".
That's the logic I am reading here