this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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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.
Signal is based in America but it's a non profit organization, not a company. Important difference
But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.
America is not a monolith. Signal's developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.
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).
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I'm putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp
Threema has a pretty big momentum in some countries.
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.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
Which?
Switzerland. ;-)
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.
I don’t know - this hype about Matrix reminds me of XMPP which was similarly popular a decade ago. Today, nobody even remembers it anymore.
Which hype? Matrix as a protocol is used for a decade now, especially by various big governments (French, Luxembourg and German governmental messenger, various German states, German and Polish armed forces, German healthcare messenger, various smaller projects in Latin America), is bridgeable (I currently have it bridged to Whatsapp and Signal amongst others) but I really don't see a hype - on the contrary I only see people predicting me the immediate apocalypse of Matrix for 5 years now, currently due to matrix.org (one of a hundred instances) introducing a premium account model for the most cost intensive (heavily media sharing)users. (See below for that).
Pepperidge farm remembers, and so do I. Lots of people I know use XMPP (Cheogram, Dino, etc).
Until Facebook buys them like they did with WhatsApp...?
Wrong.
https://threema.com/en/why-threema/open-source
FYI, while Threema front-end clients (apps) are open-source (and offer reproducible builds, which is surprisingly uncommon in open-source land), the server component, though supposedly audited, remains closed-source.
EDIT: for comparison, the Signal server code is mostly open source, but things like the spam filter are closed.
Thanks.
And I didn't know Signal had spam filters. It makes sense to not make that open source.
In my circle of 20 there has only been one instance of spam over several years. 3 of us got the same message.
They also offer Threema Libre on F-Droid for all us folks who degoogled their phone
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
If you leave WhatsApp, your chats will usually follow.
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.