Hello,
It’s been a while since I started finding Whatsapp alternative, I found IRC, XMPP, Signal etc, however the thing is that I can’t convince other people to use Whatsapp, I can’t say that “ohh it’s bad for privacy” otherwise they will say “you are not a president, nobody cares about your messages”. also I don’t live in western country so I can’t just say “I don’t want to use Whatsapp” otherwise people will get mad saying “you are not a VIP, everyone uses whatsapp and you are not special”.
however I found a way so that people won’t blame me for not using Whatsapp, I have to somehow get banned from Whatsapp and then when people ask “why don’t you use whatsapp” then I can say “ohh umm I don’t know it stopped working, you can find me on Signal”. that way people will be ready to install Signal to talk to me.
what are your thoughts? is it even possible to get perma banned from Whatsapp?
Why not just delete WhatsApp and tell people you’re banned or it won’t work for you?
“No problem, you can have my old phone for free.WhatsApp still works on that. It’s not getting any security updates anymore, but who cares.”
Signal is better for privacy than whatsapp, and of course whatsapp is owned by meta and it leaks some … metadata to them (pun intended), but as for their end to end encryption, it actually uses the same exact scheme as signal, so even if you’re forced to use it, it’s still not that bad. Way better than telegram, for example (avoid telegram).
Using Signal or other secure messaging apps should be normalized, not reserved for people who are at risk, else the simple fact that you use it raises suspicions. Not sure if this argument is enough to convince your friends … maybe just tell them you like it better due to some feature it has?
For my immediate family I’ve made a small self-hosted Matrix server before, although it has its own bundle of issues… if I were to do it again maybe I would choose Signal. But yeah from a pure technical standpoint there are lots of viable insta-messaging alternatives
Sadly you hit the nail on the head regarding the social media “network effect”… I also came from a non-US country that has been dominated by an instachat app that doesn’t respect privacy whatsoever, but good luck convincing a group of ppl to switch to a different software. Sooo… most likely even if you really do get permabanned from Whatsapp, ppl you know in real life might just keep using Whatsapp without you anyway
But anyways, if you don’t mind giving a bit of a white lie… the excuse you gave (“permabanned from Whatsapp”) actually doesn’t sound to bad to me IMO
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, try playing up the anti-American angle?
That won’t work because people here think the USA is an ideal country and do anything to get USA citizenship.
They’re probably the ones trump is deporting at the moment, the irony. I’ve been using signal with family to accommodate the stubborn android users, and it’s been fairly close to parity with Apple messages in terms of features and use. Good compromise IMO.
Find a way to scrape user data from a popular WhatsApp group and their algorithm will probably ban you
I haven’t tried to scrape WhatsApp however I tried to use WhatsApp as a monitoring system so basically what I did was send CPU usage every second however it didn’t make WhatsApp ban me. They just hid my message saying it couldn’t load the message.
