this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
1683 points (98.3% liked)
Fediverse
29542 readers
3452 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Switching from WhatsApp to any other messaging service isn't a realistic option for quite many places. I'd be more than willing to switch but of all the people in my contacts (including my entire customer base) there's like 3 people using Signal but every single one of them has WhatsApp. Even the 60+ year olds.
My trouble as well, I'd love to switch from Whatsapp, but literally every person I talk to and most people in my city/estate/country uses It.
There's a "vendor lock" term, maybe this would be a "social lock"?
It has to start with someone. I made my entire family switch to signal by boycotting WhatsApp. I just said, of you want to contact me your can either SMS, email or install signal. It was surprisingly easy. For non family members, I tell people to switch all the time. Most of my contacts now use signal. It was worth the trouble.
Don't get me wrong, I tried the switch, multiple times.
Where I live the vast majority uses pre-paid plans that give internet bandwidth, some calls but hardly no SMS, so that's not an alternative, unless in an emergency or you want to contact someone unilaterally.
If I want someone to use it, they will have to convince their other circles to do the same, which statically decreases the chances of switching, and you get things like: "but we're already talking fine on Whats (whatsapp)", "it's too much trouble to have another app just for you", "I don't care who's behind the app, its works fine".
To add salt to injury, many places (like stores, restaurants, salons, etc), have WhatsApp as the main communication method, some companies will even have the option to update you on things like delivery or banking solutions via WhatsApp.
It's something so ingrained in our culture at this point that is super hard to change.
I'm not looking for solutions here, just stating a sad state of affairs, I like privacy but it's not always an option living in society.
Yeah same for me. I guess some (quite many actually) people are aware Whutsapp&Co is evil and are just waiting for an opportunity to make the move.