this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Thank god, maybe I can get my family to switch to signal.
it's been so so nice having most of my friends and family (that want to talk to me) on Signal. it's so unobtrusive and chill not to mention the peace of mind
Teach us your ways!
so, honestly i'm a bit lucky because i'm the family and friends tech person, so i really pushed them to get on Signal if they want to reach me reliably because it's so much safer, and they trust me. I've given them practical demonstrations of end to end encryption, I also just kinda hold them hostage by only making myself super available on Signal. Also worth mention is that lots of my friends are queer or at risk in some way or another so they have lots of motivation to stay safe. I still do have to use RCS sometimes to get in touch with some family but that's better than SMS which I avoid like the plague. that's pretty much it
Same!
WhatsApp was the best messaging app out there. Clean, fast, intuitive UI. No bloat. And then Facebook bought it and shat all over it. Now it looks like their crappy Messenger app. Time to go.
This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:
The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.
This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”
Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.
Long live Signal!
Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too.
Then once we've got them hooked, it's Enshitttification Time!
Hey, is it true that the same encryption algorithm originated at Open Whisper Systems to be included in Signal.app. And so a big difference between Signal and Wahtsap is the lack of ads? Oh yeah, and the backdoor that Meta put in Shatswap.
Isn't this news 8 months old?
This has happened a couple of times recently. I'd be in favour of a rule saying if you're posting old articles/stories then there's gotta be a datestamp in the title. Just to stop people thinking this is a new development.
Yep, the NYT article is from June 2025
Sweet.....
Wow, you're fast.
💪 sorting by 🕑 New because 🔥 Hot was all read
Thats my one complaint about Lemmy. It only gives content for like 3-4 hours. How am I supposed to take a shit for 7 hours at work, with such little content and comments???
I feel like I read every comment on this site. I'm wrong, obviously, but thats how it feels.
I love when people comment. You should comment 400x more everyday. Everyone should! Tell us everything! What's your life story? How was your childhood? Did you have a bully? Did you punch them in the nose? Did you win the science fair? Did you play football? How were your college years? Did you drink 3 bottles of Bacardi 151, and wake up in Michigan in a hotel room filled with 7 lemurs, in a room paid for by Rick Morranis with zero explaination of how you even got to Michigan?
FEED THE MACHINE!!! ATTENTION SPANS DWINDLE!!! ADHD IS REAL!!! OOOOHHHH!!!! I SEE A PUPPY OUTSIDE!!!!
runs outside to play with a puppy before you can respond
I like the vibe buddy. 💖
Here I am, sorting by new all the time
I usually switch to new after scrolling the first 5 or 6 posts. Just too lazy to switch my defaults
I like scaled sort. It sorts posts by popularity relative to the size of the community, so that the feed is a mixture of both popular communities and small ones. It also seems more likely to include newer posts (eg I saw this post in my scaled feed).
Good shout. I'll have a look 💪
Dude…
SWEET!
I switched to signal, but am just switching to WIRE.
Oh no! And just when I finally got around to setting up an XMPP server, too!
Well, of course they do...