The exit plan from WhatsApp is quite simple. Start by installing Signal and setting it up – it takes only a couple of minutes. Then, resume any WhatsApp conversations on Signal if that person is already a Signal user. If they are not, then switch to regular text messaging and gently suggest to that person to switch over to Signal.
Sadly for me, this doesn't really work for some relatives as
All I can do for those relatives is to leave WhatsApp installed but take away basically every permission I can, including running in the background.
How did they get WhatsApp installed? Is a FaceTime or other video option available? Never give up, never surrender
My wishlist is an app which is not linked to a phone number, is multi platform and has a web app. It should be none US and open source. That isn’t too many requirements and yet nothing seems to full fit the bill? Anyway good luck trying to get school parent’s groups to use something other than WhatsApp.
Matrix fits the bill.
Unless you don't like the federated nature.
Matrix and Element. Run your own server if you want or use a server that's not in the US.
XMPP/Jabber via a web client like movim.eu sounds like it ought to work!
You can also look into Snikket as a host for small groups like friends or family, but can continue to use the Movim web client even if you're hosting with Snikket rather than Movim itself.
A truly ethical replacement would not need a phone number
And would have FOSS implementations of reference server & client + an openly specified protocol.
Like Matrix.
And it would have as much spam as email.
TIL I have no family I care to keep in touch with and I have no friends.
When they dropped sms support I was no longer able to convince people to migrate to signal.
Before I could make the argument that you need one sms app anyway so that app might just as well be Signal instead of the one that comes preloaded with your phone. That way people would gradually get more and more secure messaging as time went on. When sms support was dropped, Signal could not replace an existing app and adding another messing app is much less appealing than replacing one.
How about Delta Chat? At least as secure as Signal, open source, and decentralized.
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