this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
225 points (93.8% liked)
Privacy
50359 readers
489 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
yeah switching away from whatsapp is impossible. i only got my parents to switch lol
Because of the restrictions put on popular messengers in my country, I was able to move my whole family including my 80 year old grandma over to ArcaneChat. It's weird, but I literally almost never use proprietary messengers now...
It also goes to show how censorship greatly accelerates mass adoption of FLOSS tools.
Not impossible, I haven’t used WhatsApp since being bought by Facebook.
I have been waging a war of attrition getting people to switch onto Signal. After 5 years I've managed to get my spouse, my sister, my mother, 6 of my friends, 6 of my coworkers, and one sports team I play on to begin using it. Only real holdouts are my in-laws, two of my friends I talk to regularly, and another sports team or two. Some I've wooed off of basic texting, others off of WhatsApp. It's been a long hard road, but at this point, I would estimate about 85% of my communications happen over Signal now. Keep fighting the good fight
The ignorant will never switch if even the informed don't make the move.
Delete it. Inform those you regularly contact that they can contact you via Signal, email, whatever, but that you don't have WhatsApp any more.
The only way to break the network effect of WhatsApp is to leave the network.
I am self hosting matrix server, set up element in my family devices and for once we escaped the network, from time to time I do create a whatsup account while travelling, but I give up on it right after.