this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Good article - but as it points out I am entirely powerless. I can’t move away from WhatsApp as everyone, absolutely everyone I know (in the UK at least) uses WhatsApp as their primary or only messaging app/service.
You can, it'll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Thing is.. the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.
For its many.. many.. well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.
We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.
You can definitely backup and restore your messages with Signal. I think the app doesn't allow to export to clear text, but you can use 3rd party tools for extracting the clear text from the backup, such as sigbak.
Plus, the app and protocol are open source, so if a feature has enough demand, someone will eventually implement it.
Ah! I’ll look into that - thank you!