Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
Why would people switch from always-end-to-end encrypted group chats to never-end-to-end encrypted group chats?
Boosting Russia is not the solution.
I use Signal to communicate with other tech folks, but good luck convincing your dentist/doctor/etc to send reminders on signal instead of WhatsApp.
There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).
Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.
Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.
it's the network effect.
If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you. Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner. Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.
There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
You just have to check the one they use. Also, both of the apps would support notifications when something has happened in that app.
> But what if they don’t like it that much?
There is no real advantage of WhatsApp over Signal except that some people are already using it, and a significant privacy disadvantage. Once someone already has Signal then the advantage of WhatsApp is gone and only the disadvantage remains.
Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup) for some added security. Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
I think it’s safe to say that different people have different priorities which result in different choices.
This can't be a barrier to adoption in practice because most people don't even know that it's a thing in order to consider it as a difference, and anyone who both does and cares about it from the outset would have no trouble setting up automatic backups with Signal, and then appreciate the privacy advantage.
> Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/9971667844506-S...
> If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
There is no actual reason to use Whatsapp except for the network effect.
and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.
Also, you're promoting defeatism. If it's just you and you succeed 1% of the time, it still helps a little. If it's millions of people -- even if that's a small minority of the population -- and they each succeed 1% of the time, that's actually a lot of groups getting converted. And it's more likely to succeed the more people in each group who do it.
So the conclusion should be that everybody should do it, since that improves everybody's odds, rather than that nobody should.
Therefore, you risk the loss resulting from a failure.
It's why you don't just use this argument to gamble or buy lottery tickets.
Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.
Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.
Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/whatsapp/comments/11oiwse/working_a...
I'm the only person I know who ever did it.
That is the main issue.
There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.
The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
anyway, the point was not to use or endorse telegram, or the garbage i mentioned, but strive for e2ee while fast and usable.
I would sign up for anything e2ee but yeah ideally open source and hosting owned by an EU company.
Telegram is fast precisely because it's backdoored by design. Forward secret messaging app with proper key management has to encrypt the message to every peer in the group. Telegram can just use single packet to server that then pushes it to everyone else. This difference will die over time as 5G and 6G take over and phones get faster by generation. Telegram will not get more safe by generation. They're only playing to get as many users to their roach motel to make it as difficult as people for people to leave.
What about Deltachat/Arcanechat?
Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.