In my local community, we have a WhatsApp group for mutual help and services / goods exchange, the rule is no money, so it’s mostly populated by leftists more or less open to understand the problematics of internet privacy (for context). There are a bit more than 350 persons.
Today, someone sent a message telling everybody that he’s leaving Meta products for good, thus this group. A few other persons complained about meta, then I suggested that we could all leave WhatsApp and go on Signal and I briefly explained the network effect by saying that if no one uses signal because nobody is on it, then no one will ever use it if nobody takes the first step.
And this argument worked because an admin just created a signal group! More than 50 persons already switched!
Obviously the WhatsApp group will not be abandoned right away, but it has been decided that both groups will be used for now, then we’ll see at the end of the year which group we abandon.
I really see hope in that kind of events, because if I managed to make more than 50 people switch, a portion of them will do the same for their other groups and family / friends.
I plan on hosting little conferences with this group on the libre culture and the attention economics, so hopefully I’ll convince all of them that it’s the right thing to do!
Yeah! One of my issues with Signal is how clunky it is to have several profiles - something I cannot imagine living without. Not only would you need separate phone numbers, but you’d also need separate clients (or separate profiles with the same app on mobile, or different users on desktop).
Once it gets a little bit more development work, you might have a look at SimpleX because it is stupid easy to do profiles on there, but at current it is not good for group calls. It does do group messages just fine, but the column functionality is not fully there yet.
SimpleX absolutely destroys battery life on older devices. Had to disable it.
I’m in one group of like 1,500 members and I’ve noticed it takes about 7% battery which compared to signal is a lot for certain but it’s not horrible. I use lineage OS with no Google Play Services, and I find that Google Play Services still ate more battery than SimpleX does.
What of the alternatives like Matrix or XMPP? I haven’t explored these well yet, is it easy to have multiple profiles with those?
The clients I tried for Matrix had similar trouble with multiacc, yeah. However, my XMPP clients do have a tab with accounts you can toggle on and off.
And yet again i feel like XMPP is the way to go, but depends on setting up a server and managing it, i for one don’t feel like managing servers in my free time, i do that at work all day 😅
If it’s a personal server, XMPP actually pretty botherless) Matrix did randomly break for me, though.
The “distro” I’ve been eyeing is Snikket since it’s all in one with batteries included, it’s only notorious lack is bridges which is the reason i didn’t jump into it right away when i saw it (LOTS of contacts on WhatsApp, some on other Zuckerberg properties, so will likely need to do it, let’s see if the recent EU legislation leads to force them into interoperativity)
Haven’t tried Snikket, but tried the software it is based on (Prosody). Works very well and is easy to set up, and heard good things about Snikket! If you go through - good luck with it)