I literally just got my senior citizen dad off Skype and over to WhatsApp like 2 years ago... Ain't no way I can get him over to signal
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
378 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
71492 readers
4002 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
"We will never show you ads in WhatsApp. We promise". --Facebook when they bought WhatsApp and promised the previous owner not to force ads in the app...
I wonder if anyone believed them at the time
Facebook shit gonna do facebook shit
I'm forced to use WhatsApp chat so I keep it installed begrudgingly. But who the fuck is using WhatsApp stories?
I use Beeper which shows me a unified view of whatsapp and Signal and others. whatsapp itself has zero permissions on my phone. I hate that I need to have it at all but Europe is deep into that. Sigh.
There was a big uproar amongst normies when the WhatsApp TOS changed......but people forget quickly and prefer convenience. That was our one chance to convert everyone over.
But then aren't you trusting your credentials to yet another application? That seems like a bad idea....
If thats not a reason to switch to Signal what is.
But people just suck it up anyway, they did when reddit gone to shit, they did when Amazon startes showing ads even tho when you were paying, they did when Netflix disallowed sharing and you had to pay extra.
People just suck up whatever is thrown at them and are fucking stupid.
We cant have nice things, because companies will greed and if users dont react and cancel the shit out of them they and others will continue to press more moneyjuice out of people.
Sheep don't know they are being slaughtered. We're the digital 1% and we can't make the sheep wake up.
I don’t use either but my issue with Signal is none of my friends want another application to install and they are happy with WhatApp.
Conversely, I’m happy not having a group chat app and will either text you or iMessage you. Don’t you dare ring me as I ain’t answering.
I only use WhatsApp for work and none of my coworkers are switching off it. They have too much invested in it. Family specifically.
Meta has been running ads claiming no one can read your WhatsApp messages, including them. For some reason, I'm not 100% sure about this. It's hard to imagine they can resist grabbing all that data for their AI somehow.
Of course they fucking grab it. They have 45 backdoors with golden handles otherwise they're show the fucking source
I wished Whatsapp wasn't a thing so much. There are so many so much better apps. Signal is so much better and it would work fine for the vast majority of people.
Unfortunately "better" varies from person to person. Signal is behind on features, e.g. WhatsApp has integration for businesses (customer support).
I hope my monthly donation will help but we must realize for some some features are important, I guess that for most it's how many ppl they know is there/unwilling to lead a migration
Seems like I'm not in the target audience for these ads. I have absolutely zero clue what any of the things mentioned above are. I use WhatsApp to send messages.
*gasp*
Who could have ever seen this move coming? From Facebook, of all companies!
To be fair, I am shocked... Not to see a Pikachu face in the comments.
whatsapp-free since 2023!
Good news good Signal.
Only shocking part of this is that it took them this long.
This is one of the train that impossible for me to get off. It is very ubiquitous in my country to use whatsapp instead of text. I must suck it up I guess. 😅
Be the change
A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don't, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.
If it's hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.
load more comments
(4 replies)
It may not fit your exact needs, but my solution to WhatsApp and fb messenger is to bridge them with a beeper account. Of course you lose the calling ability, but if you're not using it for calls it is a good enough solution. The other caveat (at least with fb messenger) is you still need to check on your actual account if you get any legit messages from someone not on your list.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Hopefully this helps people move off of WhatsApp to Signal or something else.
Yeah like it moved them off of Xitter, Reddit, Facebook and Instagram.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I’m more surprised it took them this long. Thankfully there are already many decent alternative messaging apps.
but still nobody is going to switch. whenever i try to convince people to switch, they just defend whatsapp and I'm a whiner
Or they do switch but for like 1 day and then go back to messaging you on WhatsApp. I tried switching to signal at least a couple times, even convinced a couple groups to move, but not a single chat lasted more than a couple weeks. Eventually they all went back to WhatsApp. Every single one. It's extremely difficult to get people to care.
through its Stories-like status feature.
Eh, I've only seen it because of a misclick
Time to ditch WhatsApp
👆 mark that comment. I'm sure you'll write that again in a year or so
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Signal doesnt have ads...
view more: next ›