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?
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