After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It's still an American company, so it's not ideal. But it's still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It's still an American company, so it's not ideal. But it's still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.

Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).

There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.

Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).

For now anyways lol

How about matrix?

There are many such apps. The page links to EFF one which ranked some messaging apps and included stuff like Threema (though good luck getting anyone to use it because it's a paid version). Then, there is Briar, available on F Droid as well, which runs on a decentralised model but I don't think I know anyone IRL who has even heard of it.

Telegram, I think, Atleast in my country is the second most popular thing behind WhatsApp but in it's default state, it's less secure and one needs to enable e2e encryption(read : secret chats).

I am willing to move to almost any service ( I mean, I still use IRC, so..) but the main point is would anyone I know be on them? I once gave Signal a try but quickly wound uninstalling it because there was no one I knew there.

I dislike WhatsApp as well (it's desktop variant is so slow and takes such a long time to sync messages plus Telegram has better inline support for images for example compared to Meta's version). It doesn't help that it's status page also promotes useless channels and that it is a hub of misinformation.

There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.

Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).

And Switzerlands records in terms of privacy sadly is far worse than most people think - even with the last attack being repelled.

Matrix (preferably on a non-matrix.org instance) currently is the preferable non US and privacy friendly way.

Threema has a pretty big momentum in some countries.

What does this mean

Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I'm just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.

You can help making it stronger. That’s what I did in Germany: if people want to contact me, I usually give them my Threema ID first, everything else comes later.

Sadly many still don't want to switch. My most active chats are in signal now but the large majority of chats are still on whatsapp