In my local community, we have a WhatsApp group for mutual help and services / goods exchange, the rule is no money, so it’s mostly populated by leftists more or less open to understand the problematics of internet privacy (for context). There are a bit more than 350 persons.
Today, someone sent a message telling everybody that he’s leaving Meta products for good, thus this group. A few other persons complained about meta, then I suggested that we could all leave WhatsApp and go on Signal and I briefly explained the network effect by saying that if no one uses signal because nobody is on it, then no one will ever use it if nobody takes the first step.
And this argument worked because an admin just created a signal group! More than 50 persons already switched!
Obviously the WhatsApp group will not be abandoned right away, but it has been decided that both groups will be used for now, then we’ll see at the end of the year which group we abandon.
I really see hope in that kind of events, because if I managed to make more than 50 people switch, a portion of them will do the same for their other groups and family / friends.
I plan on hosting little conferences with this group on the libre culture and the attention economics, so hopefully I’ll convince all of them that it’s the right thing to do!
I think that’s great, well done.
One thing which I’m curious about is that now Signal is proposing itself as a zoom replacement with call links and the ability to share a username rather than a phone number. This makes it interesting in a work setting, given that there is a desktop app too.
However, I have a possibly unique gripe with it: how do I manage my personal vs professional profile picture? Currently I have a profile picture which I’m using mostly for friends and family. But that is not ideal for a professional setting. And them maybe I’d like to join some online communities more anonymously. I don’t want to use the same profile picture for all 3 settings. I wish Signal would make it easier to manage the profile picture selectively and more granularly.
Anyone else within them same position?