I ditched WhatsApp back in 2021 (and lost a couple og long-distance friends in the process), and I communicate mostly over DeltaChat, XMPP (née Jabber), and Signal, in that order of preference.

There are many other alternatives out there, e.g. SimpleX, but many — if not most — suffer from the inability to synchronize chats across several devices.

DeltaChat should pose no problems to users coming from WhatsApp, having more or less the same UI as I remember from WhatsApp back then. DeltaChat is an amazing app, check it out:

https://delta.chat/en/

You needn't even disclose who you are.

Not much point here (UK). It’s difficult to get anyone to move or even install it. No one cares enough to show any interest.

Needs to be a large billboard marketing campaign which is “zuck eats children and owns WhatsApp” or something. Then you might get 5% of people move over.

My immediate family are on it and two friends. That represents a year of trying.

I tried to install Signal once. First, it checks and matches your phone number. Strange, but acceptable. Then, it shows a Google Captcha [0], which sends my data to Google. I checked Signal's Privacy Policy and there are no details data sharing [1].

Signal might be good at message encryption, but let's not forget that it handles user privacy unacceptably poorly.

[0] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/6002

[1] https://signal.org/legal/

I tried Signal, but it wouldn’t let me export chats, meaning the data is trapped within the app. Did they fix that?

Signal has a central, proprietary server. It's between impractical and impossible to run your own Signal server like you can with Matrix, Revolt, or Delta Chat for example. BlueSky has a similar approach (compare to Mastodon).

Also Signal requires a phone number to sign-in. It's not exactly private. AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.

The WhatsApp co-founder gave Signal $105M in 2018. Signal costs ~$50M/year to run. It's also funded by wealthy donors such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter, BlueSky, Square). BTW Jack is now pushing Signal to integrate Bitcoin.

When evaluating the "ethics" of a chat platform, we should factor-in the metadata, soft power, and eventual leverage that centralized (controlled by a few) platforms like BlueSky and Signal afford to wealthy folks who are bankrolling it.

Does anyone else find Signal quite hard to use? The syncing between devices stops working a lot of the time, and needing to sign in again fairly regularly. I’ve tried switching but it doesn’t stick because of the annoyance factor.

As long as I need a phone to use those, they are not a solution.

I'm still sad that they'll probably never provide a proper web client instead of that suboptimal Electron desktop thing.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4466

Signal doesn't provide any method to backup and restore my chats, at least on iOS. Imo this is a very important feature, I have chat history going back for years and it's basically a rich media diary of my life. It happens occasionally that I want to look up stuff that has been shared a few years ago, especially photos. Is ownership over my own data really too much to ask? The possibility of losing my entire chat history scares me. I get that some people even consider it a feature, but without the ability to backup and restore messages it's not really a "replacement" for WhatsApp, it's merely an alternative with pros and (very big) cons.

SimpleX[1], no phone number required.

[1] https://simplex.chat/

I don't think Signal is an ethical replacement as it forces others to use the same app and vendor as you.

Options like Matrix or XMPP give users more freedom

WhatsApp's call quality is second to none. Also the fact that it's ubiquitous, and its sync just works, makes it difficult to move to anything else. Everyone's on it in South Africa. I think we can only hope for regulation to keep it safe and force interoperability with other chat apps.

If I wanted to self host and offer my users something with encryption like Signal, what would be a good solution? Would love to enable accounts for everyone who has an account with us on supabase.

Any recommendations?

As someone in the extremely near east, please create an ethical replacement for Telegram.

From a product point of view, maybe that's a fork of Signal? Maybe Signal Group, or something along those lines?

The only secure comms I’m aware of would be something like the receipt of a signal over radio encrypted with a one time pad.

Transmission of the signal and key is another matter.

lol I'm from Germany and most people I know use for many years already :D

For me no, until Signal will fix video call quality between ios and android.

I use them both to connect with my family, signal for chats, but whatsapp for video calls, because very often in Signal you are minecraft.

First place here is FaceTime link (so it opens in a browser), and second is WhatsApp.

How does Signal make money? All chat apps suffer from the same problem that users want to use someone else’s infrastructure for free. WhatsApp is great because it is run by a for—profit company, listed on a stock market, allowing users to take an ownership stake.

Pointing out that WhatsApp was used to spread misinformation before Brazilian elections under the header “Ethical issues with WhatsApp” seems weird to me.

According to the Guardian article[0] this article uses as a source, WhatsApp has had updates to limit the number of times messages can be forwarded. But there’s obviously a limit to what can be done because the chats are e2e encrypted.

What does the author want from WhatsApp? Reading messages and blocking them if they don’t pass Meta’s moral guidelines is the opposite of want you’d want from your private chats and I don’t see any other way to effectively combat spreading misinformation.

And is there any indication that Signal would prevent situations like this if it gets more widely used?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-...

Wake me up when Signal stops depending on a phone number. One of the few things I feel I could lose very easily. And some people (eg my kid) don't even have a phone number!

very ethical phone-tied centralized metadata collection

A few months back I opened Signal on my daily driver phone. All my contacts and message history were simply gone. Apparently this is a security feature designed to keep me safe.

There is always a tradeoff between usability and security, and Signal is too secure for me

I'm persuaded

It's not a replacement, since it doesn't have the same feature sets or ergonomics.

Don't get me wrong, I use signal a lot and I love it, but presenting signals as an alternative to whatsapp is only going to disappoint people.

Telegram is closer, but neither e2e encrypted nor open source.

Still, I would say if you are in America and not dealing with state or industrial secrets, getting spied on by russians is better than by meta.

Basically, I use both: signals for my privacy oriented friends that will go through the ordeal of using signal, and telegram with the normies so that at least they get of the zuck train.

I see people mentioning all sorts of alternatives, but not one of Session. I can't tell if you all know something I don't and that it's garbage, or if it's just that obscure.

The history of chat networks over the last quarter century is that they come and go and there is no long term loyalty to any of them. ICQ, AOL, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook Messenger, Google's many messengers, etc. are long forgotten and some of those used to be dominant and their disappearance seemed unimaginable. Mostly this is due to corporate stupidity and big corporations getting greedy about "owning" their user base and then throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

It seems Meta (a repeat offended with this) is yet again making that mistake with whatsapp. Prediction: they'll run it into the ground just like they ran Facebook Messenger into the ground. And Facebook itself of course.

Whatsapp only showed up because of extortion prices for SMS messages. It did the same thing for a fraction of the cost (1$/year initially). Easy sell, so it grew to many users. But who uses SMS at this point? I get a few once in a while. Mostly stupid 2FA codes. The core premise for Whatsapp has long disappeared.

Whatsapp is probably going to implode as Meta starts pushing through unpopular things like advertising and continues to be in the spotlight for routinely doing dodgy things with respect to privacy, surveillance, etc. They are just not a great brand when it comes to that and they are losing a lot of trust over time.

Mostly people use whatsapp because other people use whatsapp. Not because it's particularly good. IMHO it actually always was a bit meh compared to other things. But world+dog seems to like sending me messages with it so I'm on it.

For the same reason I've had Signal on my phone for a few years now and more and more messages are coming in via that. Neither are optional at this point. I expect Signal will eat a lot of the Whatsapp traffic soon.

And if not Signal than something else. Whatsapp was famously built with only a small team. That's 16 years ago. These days building something like that from scratch could be done in a fraction of the time with minimal effort. You could vibe code an MVP in an afternoon and it wouldn't be horrible. This stuff is a pure commodity at this point. We don't need trillion dollar big tech companies doing this for us.

No, it's just crypto bullshit.

If you are from the U.S. sure, serves the interests of your country

If you are not from the U.S., then no, it's not a replacement for WhatsApp, it's the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

"but E2E encryption my dude"

You have forgotten about RSA, my dude

Why Signal, why not X, Y, Z? ask yourself why something from Cali always gets picked up and talked about, but people's favorite? nevaaaaaaah

we have already an ethical replacement for WhatsApp, and it's called Telegram. Unlike WhatsApp the clients are opensource (you can download it from F-Droid) and it's secure enough: https://x.com/Pinboard/status/1474096410383421452

Signal is cool, I think it has made a huge contribution to whatsapp through its collaboration.

But I think that there's room for nuance, sure it's closed source and a closed garden, but that's precisely what allows it to be gratis and free of spam (you can't build the client, you can't build a spamming client)! Sure it's controlled by an entity that may or may not use that data for ads. But it's metadata and not content, sure the NSA or some three letter agency may tap it for national security reasons(or at least masquerading as natsec reasons), but not even subfederal law enforcement and courts can access the contents of the message (E2E encryption).

The contributions of Free Software has been unquantifiable, but if it continues to treat all closed source things as equally bad, then you get extremism. Surely there's a difference between an entity seeing metadata, and an entity seeing message contents, this is a non trivial distinction.

Congratulations to signal if they develop an algorithm where they can't even see the metadata, but I'm not even convinced that it's good? The article cites cases of Meta products being used for malicious purposes, at least we hear from them? At least Zuck shows up against the senate to answer when shit hits the fan, if Signal is used in other parts of the world to organize coups or ethnic cleansing, you just would never hear about it because it's all super anonymous 5 stars, but ethically they would still be contributing as much as Facebook or Whatsapp.

And on that topic, I don't think overfixating on Meta's role in a multi actor causal chain to be very productive? I think it comes more of a place of Free Software developers being jealous that they didn't win the popularity contest, and less from a place of genuine concern. I used to be anti Whatsapp too, but at some point I realized that 1B users have as much say in what technologies we should use than developers, it's not all about the tech. Whatsapp has gained the trust from billions of users, ignoring them and telling them we know better because we have been indoctrinated by recruiting evangelists of an extremist ideology is not the way forward. I do believe in moderate free software and Whatsapp is one of the lowest hanging fruits to accept in the path to moderate FS

> In March I argued that we should choose Bluesky over X/Twitter, based on the obvious reason of boycotting companies connected to Musk.

Let’s f*ck up Zuck just because OP doesn’t like him. How can a post like this be at the top?

Please not that I advocate people to use Signal.