I have started using privacy respecting software as much as I can for a while now. Particularly social media. I started with deleting my reddit account, and then one by one deleted twitter, instagram and all. The one thing I couldn’t leave was whatsapp. I just cannot seem to leave it. Not just friends and family, but outside too. My mentor just use whatsapp for all types of communication except for some absolutely formal documents, where he uses email. Otherwise he doesn’t seem to respond to email.
So, my question: If you have made the switch, have you convinced your peers to also make the switch?
I have only managed to convince a part of my family to use signal when talking to me (another relative seems to be somewhat using it too, so that’s a bit convenient to have them keep using it), but apart from that almost no-one got convince to use it or left it after like a week of usage.
At least there’s simpleX now which has a lower entry barrier (just a username), so I might have better luck with it.
Edit: I saw this is the india community, oops, I’m from Greece😅
Lol, no worries, your story was still helpful
To signal for a bit, and some to matrix, but the network effect is in effect
The accursed network effect
Family! , I can’t even convince my friends !!
Guess we can only convert like minded people
I changed my profile picture to something like this and quit all the nonfree social apps one by one after a few months. Currently I have onboarded 3 or 4 friends on XMPP with the profile pic, though they just call it Quicksy. Family still use whatsapp and have no means to text me other than sms.
EDIT: here’s the template, feel free to make a copy and edit https://cryptpad.disroot.org/diagram/#/2/diagram/view/wSR3FAgY9EhEXhuuVnRsk9AvPYdEPFGFg2fOaL7y68w/
how does this work
assuming you meant how XMPP works: it’s a federated chat protocol introduced in 1999. Many commercial instant messaging services initially used the protocol to communicate with users, including Google Talk, AOL, Facebook chat, Microsoft Messenger and even Skype. Eventually most of the commercial services got enshittified and removed XMPP support. XMPP is still used by people and supports video calls, end to end encryption and many shiny stuff.
If you’re new to XMPP, you might like this guide by @contrapunctus@en.osm.town https://katb.in/xmpp-guide (long url https://contrapunctus.codeberg.page/the-quick-and-easy-guide-to-xmpp.html)
Government Departments are still using WhatsApp for their official communications to employees 🙂
And so many uses gmail as well. NIC should give out more email to government departments.
grail?
btw nic is ready to give it is the govt departments who are unable to cope up with them.
Plus they need workspace too, in that case Microsoft is best, otherwise for localisation, zoho seems to be good
grail?
It was supposed to be gmail, but my stupid keyboard autocorrect replaced it with grail. I edited the comment, but it seems edits are not federated from piefed to mastodon.
Plus they need workspace too
I did not know that. Honestly I am not entirely sure what they need.
Frequently, see my recent posts.
