this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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This is what I hate most about the privacy community, too fanatical and purist to allow extremely useful optional features that would allow them to reach more people.
I use Signal whenever I can because I'm not comfortable with Meta harvesting metadata of my conversations with people. guess what would happen if Signal made it possible to talk to Whatsapp accounts?
You could go on without doing it. I would like to use signal to signal, but there are literally zero people interested in my environment :-(
Using signal just me would be much better than using whatsapp directly, and would reduce the data collected.
If signal suddenly stopped being mostly a geek desert and people could still talk to all their contacts, don't you think they would be much more willing to move? The more people, the more people interested in migrating, and the less data for meta.
no, why would they, if they could talk to Signal anyway?
Because when you give most people the choice of convenience vs privacy, they'll choose the thing that they can feel 99 times out of 100(convenience ). Most people don't care about metadata because first of all they have no idea that's even a thing, let alone what it does. And they're not visibly affected by it. The difference between using signal and Whatsapp for the vast majority of people is the fact that one is green and has everyone you know on it and the other is blue and nobody besides me uses it.
But, if you give signal the convenience of being able to use it with everyone, then the choice becomes "do I wanna use this app that my friend is saying is spying on me or do I wanna use the secure, hacker app?"
And hopefully, more and more people will switch and we can be rid of fucking meta
If the user base is signal's big draw, I'm afraid we're screwed with such a tiny one against those titans.
Signal users are far more likely to need to use whatsapp than the other way around, and migrating to signal is a huge loss with not very popular gains. I don't see how it could compete on a level playing field, but that's where the opportunity to eliminate signal's huge disadvantage comes in.