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I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I me

I guess this was expected, but it makes me feel really powerless in the sense that I can't really move away from WhatsApp. I have a couple of friends that I message via Signal and even convinced my dad to use it a while back, but here in Brazil WhatsApp is _everything_, and I doubt most people care about this at all. In my case, I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp). It's one of those where unless just about everyone were to go over to Signal, most people won't, because keeping track of messages in two apps is quite hard. That leaves me stuck in this ecosystem, which is quite sad.

klabb3 1y ago
Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.
- drstewart 1y ago
  What about non traveling Chinese?
  - eloisant 1y ago
    I'd say Chinese people are aware that their Internet is pretty different from the rest of the world. Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).
    - clocker 1y ago
      Ironically WhatsApp is also American.
      - GFischer 1y ago
        But it gained way more traction in other parts of the world, it's the default messaging platform in South America for EVERYTHING. I have never seen an iMessage.
    - knowitnone 1y ago
      Your comment is snide and unnecessary. Do Chinese walk around thinking they want to be more American? No they don't. Americans certainly dont believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them - typically go about their own business. Chinese may be influenced by western shows and movies but everybody is influenced by the shows that they watch. Why do Americans need to think about the rest of the world? Do Chinese think about the rest of the world? Your hatred really shows in your comment.
      - sebastiennight 1y ago
        Your reading of GP's comment is quite uncharitable. I did not read any "hatred" (of nationals from either country) in his post.
    - Lammy 1y ago
      Hacker News Commenters tend to believe it's possible to generalize hundreds of millions of people at once after seeing maybe a few thousand of them.
- recursive 1y ago
  > It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. I've lived in the US all my life, and I didn't even know there was a norm at all, so that's not much of a threshold.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    It's less prominent if you were already 20-30 when the first iPhone came out. In slightly-affluent primary schools, owning an iPhone was your inroad to a cult of iMessage games and insular group chats. If you didn't beg mommy and daddy to fork over $600 and tax to Verizon then you didn't join the cool group chats. It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.
    - throwaway314155 1y ago
      Respectfully, you can't extrapolate a single experience to _every_ "slightly-affluent primary school". Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes such as "did you just judge me for a green bubble? what sort of asshole thinks that's worth judging someone over?" (group proceeds to make fun of the iPhone user)
      - bigyabai 1y ago
        > Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period. My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.
        1y ago
- afiori 1y ago
  I know exactly 3 people that use emails for personal human to human comunications. I am sure that it is more common in other slices of the world.
CivBase 1y ago
This is why we need to unify on protocols, not platforms.
- greensh 1y ago
  i mean this protocol does exist with RCS. In fact if you use your SMS client it probably defaults to RCS if you have an Internet connection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
  - account42 1y ago
    Can third-parties setup their own RCS server and message users on existing servers?
mvieira38 1y ago
Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  I have been that guy a few times in last few years. But > If they are actually your friends this just takes the cake to a different dimension altogether!
- sebastiennight 1y ago
  Why would you block people instead of just messaging them about how you're moving to Signal, and then uninstalling WhatsApp? This approach seems unnecessarily confrontational and might end up being quite counterproductive.
  - mvieira38 1y ago
    Because then they have the option of readding you to group chats and sending you messages ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something
    - sebastiennight 1y ago
      I appreciate your point of view. Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready). I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes. How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult) So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced. So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough
Moldoteck 1y ago
you should still slowly push for more ppl in family to use signal. In moldova as example most ppl used viber, but moved gradually to telegram and whatsapp. I've convinced my family/friends to use telegram in the past, but I'll slowly help them use Signal more. Changes rarely happen fast
- jama211 1y ago
  Is there functionality whatsapp provides (even if it’s really unrelated to software features, just by happenstance due to its widespread usage) that signal doesn’t currently provide for? If so, it’s a losing battle. No one would go backwards in functionality unless the ads got egregious.
  - Moldoteck 1y ago
    imo there's only one important feature - chat backups. WA allows doing periodical backups into google drive to not lose the data
    - jama211 1y ago
      What you consider important may not be what others consider important. Seems like you know of other features that others find important you’re just not wanting to mention those because it undermines your point.
- ndr 1y ago
  What makes Signal less at risk than WhatsApp? Are they profitable in other ways? Are they at the same risk of capture?
  - alternatex 1y ago
    Non-profit and actually quite economically efficient per user. Once WhatsApp was bought by Meta the writing was on the wall. I moved out of it immediately and I'm surprised people are caught off-guard by this news. I suppose there's little guarantee Signal won't be sold, but an ultra popular app with no profit, owned by a single bloke (WhatsApp) was the last thing I expected to be a sustainable platform for my communications. Same reason I've never looked at Telegram.
throw7 1y ago
I refuse to be in servility to an app and don't use whatsapp. Facebook uses you. Let others, your friends, and family know the facts. In the case of "business requirements", push back on businesses. You are actually the customer. I get it though. The best might be a compromise where you try to limit the contacts on whatsapp to only those you have no choice.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  That's the way. > I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp) Comments like these make me think it's probably more a problem of inertia. Of course they can still talk to family (visit/call/email/sms/fax/mail,...), and of course they can still do their taxes, they might just have to get a different accountant that does business outside of WhatsApp. This all would take more energy than living in this beautifully convenient platform that Meta set up for them.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
how is Apple in Brazil? iMessage is the way to go
- GFischer 1y ago
  Why? Isn't it a closed, non interoperable platform? Android has 88% market share in Brazil, so it sounds like terrible advice.
- hermanzegerman 1y ago
  Outside of the US the majority of people use Android Phones
knowitnone 1y ago
what you're saying is they've locked you in. Good business model
yakkomajuri 1y ago
This has led to all sorts of opinions on the thread, which are all very interesting! I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach. I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work. I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp. Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.
- palata 1y ago
  I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should). But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-). I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".
  - saurik 1y ago
    > (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should) FWIW, as far as I ever could tell, Facebook did this correctly: the only real thing is letting a business have an account without a phone number; they then provide the software you can run on your server to be a WhatsApp client, so all of your user's messages are then end-to-end encrypted to your business. Yes: later on they decided they'd get in the business of offering a "hosted client"--which meant that, technically, if you used that service, they could see the messages, which caused a change to their terms of service, as a blanket statement that Facebook can't ever see messages isn't technically true anymore, which Signal threw a ton of FUD at :/--but anyone could have offered that service before (and could right now also for Signal).
tenthirtyam 1y ago
I had this problem some years ago. Eventually I just told everyone I would be uninstalling whatsapp on date XX/YY, which I then did. Some people installed signal and stayed in touch, others didn't. Life didn't change much. Now I'd like to move to my own matrix server but I think appx 0.0% of my social group would follow me down that rabbit hole. :-( More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.
- RileyJames 1y ago
  This message reminded me to email a few people. Thanks.
- an_aparallel 1y ago
  I left whatsapp long ago when it was bought by meta, due to my privacy beliefs. I quit facebook in 2007 when i caught negative behaviour patterns. Im staunchly anti social media, however it would be dishonest not to note that it is lonely, organising anything is tedious, you have no access to the used goods marketplace (fees on sales platforms are too high). I dont really know if privacy is worth it. But tbh the thought of going back makes my skin crawl.

klabb3 1y ago

Yup. Non-traveling US Americans mostly won’t understand how critical WhatsApp is in many parts of the world, for more than a decade. It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. Businesses put WhatsApp numbers on their stores, and it’s often the only way to get a hold of a person. I would bet it’s more used than email, especially for young people. If WhatsApp went down for a week, it would seriously impede normal societal functions. It’s pretty much de-facto standard and arguably critical infrastructure.

drstewart 1y ago
What about non traveling Chinese?
- eloisant 1y ago
  I'd say Chinese people are aware that their Internet is pretty different from the rest of the world. Americans tend to believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them (when they think about the rest of the world at all).
  - clocker 1y ago
    Ironically WhatsApp is also American.
    - GFischer 1y ago
      But it gained way more traction in other parts of the world, it's the default messaging platform in South America for EVERYTHING. I have never seen an iMessage.
  - knowitnone 1y ago
    Your comment is snide and unnecessary. Do Chinese walk around thinking they want to be more American? No they don't. Americans certainly dont believe everyone is trying very hard to be like them - typically go about their own business. Chinese may be influenced by western shows and movies but everybody is influenced by the shows that they watch. Why do Americans need to think about the rest of the world? Do Chinese think about the rest of the world? Your hatred really shows in your comment.
    - sebastiennight 1y ago
      Your reading of GP's comment is quite uncharitable. I did not read any "hatred" (of nationals from either country) in his post.
  - Lammy 1y ago
    Hacker News Commenters tend to believe it's possible to generalize hundreds of millions of people at once after seeing maybe a few thousand of them.
recursive 1y ago
> It’s much much stronger than the iMessage norm in the US. I've lived in the US all my life, and I didn't even know there was a norm at all, so that's not much of a threshold.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  It's less prominent if you were already 20-30 when the first iPhone came out. In slightly-affluent primary schools, owning an iPhone was your inroad to a cult of iMessage games and insular group chats. If you didn't beg mommy and daddy to fork over $600 and tax to Verizon then you didn't join the cool group chats. It sounds petty, but not very abnormal for growing up in America.
  - throwaway314155 1y ago
    Respectfully, you can't extrapolate a single experience to _every_ "slightly-affluent primary school". Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes such as "did you just judge me for a green bubble? what sort of asshole thinks that's worth judging someone over?" (group proceeds to make fun of the iPhone user)
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      > Even the most miniscule of cultural differences can and will lead to different outcomes I certainly didn't say it was the only outcome. I switched schools three times in my youth, and each place I went had different kids but the same materialist obsessions. Some people did mock the Apple users, for what little it did to get them into the iMessage chats. Every school I went to had an 'iPhone in group' though, and if you didn't have the right phone you didn't get to chat, period. My larger point, which you really don't need to extrapolate for, is that Apple knew they were making a FOMO-based service that would predate on kids and adults with maligned priorities. They understood the social clusterfuck that they engineered, and marketed the hell out of it; because it worked, bragging about iMessage does sell iPhones.
      - 1y ago
afiori 1y ago
I know exactly 3 people that use emails for personal human to human comunications. I am sure that it is more common in other slices of the world.

CivBase 1y ago

This is why we need to unify on protocols, not platforms.

greensh 1y ago
i mean this protocol does exist with RCS. In fact if you use your SMS client it probably defaults to RCS if you have an Internet connection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
- account42 1y ago
  Can third-parties setup their own RCS server and message users on existing servers?

mvieira38 1y ago

Last night I just removed myself from every friend groupchat and blocked everyone there, while leaving a status message about how they can reach me on Signal or call me. If they are actually your friends they'll come around, and families survived before Whatsapp existed. I'm also brazilian, I just won't stand with people dismissing what matters to me as if I'm a nutjob for not using their fascist app

crossroadsguy 1y ago
I have been that guy a few times in last few years. But > If they are actually your friends this just takes the cake to a different dimension altogether!
sebastiennight 1y ago
Why would you block people instead of just messaging them about how you're moving to Signal, and then uninstalling WhatsApp? This approach seems unnecessarily confrontational and might end up being quite counterproductive.
- mvieira38 1y ago
  Because then they have the option of readding you to group chats and sending you messages ETA: there is no way to really uninstall Whatsapp around here because so much of society runs on it, the most I can do is move all of my private existence elsewhere and hope that decreased traffic will do something
  - sebastiennight 1y ago
    I appreciate your point of view. Please allow me to be devil's advocate here (and FYI, this comes from someone living in a country where government officials use [official state institution]@gmail.com to ask you to send passports and other info, and tell you they'll whatsapp you your papers when they're ready). I have not yet been in a situation where you CANNOT skip WhatsApp - since having someone be your one-time intermediary is almost always possible. Can it be an incovenience ? Yes. How much would this inconvenience compare to what my grandfather's grandfather would consider an inconvenience? Probably not much. (You mean, I had to twiddle my thumbs for twice as many minutes!? How difficult) So in the end, you're asking people to experience what they consider to be a major hassle (having 2 apps) just for you, when you're not willing to go through the pain of having just one app. It feels unbalanced. So please consider that people might be complaining that you're being too much of a Don Quixote, but actually, the reason it's not working is because you're not playing the Don Quixote card hard enough

Moldoteck 1y ago

you should still slowly push for more ppl in family to use signal. In moldova as example most ppl used viber, but moved gradually to telegram and whatsapp. I've convinced my family/friends to use telegram in the past, but I'll slowly help them use Signal more. Changes rarely happen fast

jama211 1y ago
Is there functionality whatsapp provides (even if it’s really unrelated to software features, just by happenstance due to its widespread usage) that signal doesn’t currently provide for? If so, it’s a losing battle. No one would go backwards in functionality unless the ads got egregious.
- Moldoteck 1y ago
  imo there's only one important feature - chat backups. WA allows doing periodical backups into google drive to not lose the data
  - jama211 1y ago
    What you consider important may not be what others consider important. Seems like you know of other features that others find important you’re just not wanting to mention those because it undermines your point.
ndr 1y ago
What makes Signal less at risk than WhatsApp? Are they profitable in other ways? Are they at the same risk of capture?
- alternatex 1y ago
  Non-profit and actually quite economically efficient per user. Once WhatsApp was bought by Meta the writing was on the wall. I moved out of it immediately and I'm surprised people are caught off-guard by this news. I suppose there's little guarantee Signal won't be sold, but an ultra popular app with no profit, owned by a single bloke (WhatsApp) was the last thing I expected to be a sustainable platform for my communications. Same reason I've never looked at Telegram.

throw7 1y ago

I refuse to be in servility to an app and don't use whatsapp. Facebook uses you. Let others, your friends, and family know the facts. In the case of "business requirements", push back on businesses. You are actually the customer. I get it though. The best might be a compromise where you try to limit the contacts on whatsapp to only those you have no choice.

barbazoo 1y ago
That's the way. > I'd love to just go over to Signal fully but then I couldn't talk to family, friends, and probably couldn't even book a haircut or pay my taxes (my accountant messages me on WhatsApp) Comments like these make me think it's probably more a problem of inertia. Of course they can still talk to family (visit/call/email/sms/fax/mail,...), and of course they can still do their taxes, they might just have to get a different accountant that does business outside of WhatsApp. This all would take more energy than living in this beautifully convenient platform that Meta set up for them.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

how is Apple in Brazil? iMessage is the way to go

GFischer 1y ago
Why? Isn't it a closed, non interoperable platform? Android has 88% market share in Brazil, so it sounds like terrible advice.
hermanzegerman 1y ago
Outside of the US the majority of people use Android Phones

knowitnone 1y ago

what you're saying is they've locked you in. Good business model

yakkomajuri 1y ago

This has led to all sorts of opinions on the thread, which are all very interesting! I do agree that just accepting this is not the way to go, and also that slowly making changes is a valid approach. I do want to qualify though, for those who aren't in a WhatsApp-heavy country, how things work. I looked at my latest messages and beyond all my friends and all my family, I have my accountant, my landlord, my barber, HOA, groups for birthday party invites (where you're asked to confirm attendance), a painter, etc. In many restaurants, if you want a reservation, WhatsApp is the only way. For people who work in Brazil (I work remotely for a company abroad), a lot of work communication happens on WhatsApp. Again, this is not to say that not dong anything is the way to go! But I think abroad some people don't understand the extent to which WhatsApp is used here. Someone mentioned iMessage for instance and I don't think I know a single person who uses it. Most Brazilians have Android phones too.

palata 1y ago
I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should). But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-). I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".
- saurik 1y ago
  > (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should) FWIW, as far as I ever could tell, Facebook did this correctly: the only real thing is letting a business have an account without a phone number; they then provide the software you can run on your server to be a WhatsApp client, so all of your user's messages are then end-to-end encrypted to your business. Yes: later on they decided they'd get in the business of offering a "hosted client"--which meant that, technically, if you used that service, they could see the messages, which caused a change to their terms of service, as a blanket statement that Facebook can't ever see messages isn't technically true anymore, which Signal threw a ton of FUD at :/--but anyone could have offered that service before (and could right now also for Signal).

tenthirtyam 1y ago

I had this problem some years ago. Eventually I just told everyone I would be uninstalling whatsapp on date XX/YY, which I then did. Some people installed signal and stayed in touch, others didn't. Life didn't change much. Now I'd like to move to my own matrix server but I think appx 0.0% of my social group would follow me down that rabbit hole. :-( More extreme, a friend of mine one day eliminated his cellphone entirely but kept Skype on his laptop. So now it's email or nothing with him and sadly it's been nothing for some time now.

RileyJames 1y ago
This message reminded me to email a few people. Thanks.
an_aparallel 1y ago
I left whatsapp long ago when it was bought by meta, due to my privacy beliefs. I quit facebook in 2007 when i caught negative behaviour patterns. Im staunchly anti social media, however it would be dishonest not to note that it is lonely, organising anything is tedious, you have no access to the used goods marketplace (fees on sales platforms are too high). I dont really know if privacy is worth it. But tbh the thought of going back makes my skin crawl.