“if you have nothing to hide…” Is just another fascist talking point. Your friends are repeating the propoganda.

I don’t think you need to get yourself banned. Tell them you will make the switch, and when you’ll make it. You don’t need to explain yourself any further or make excuses.

Why not just delete WhatsApp and tell people you’re banned or it won’t work for you?

Signal is better for privacy than whatsapp, and of course whatsapp is owned by meta and it leaks some … metadata to them (pun intended), but as for their end to end encryption, it actually uses the same exact scheme as signal, so even if you’re forced to use it, it’s still not that bad. Way better than telegram, for example (avoid telegram).

Using Signal or other secure messaging apps should be normalized, not reserved for people who are at risk, else the simple fact that you use it raises suspicions. Not sure if this argument is enough to convince your friends … maybe just tell them you like it better due to some feature it has?

WhatsApp is owned by Meta, try playing up the anti-American angle?

For my immediate family I’ve made a small self-hosted Matrix server before, although it has its own bundle of issues… if I were to do it again maybe I would choose Signal. But yeah from a pure technical standpoint there are lots of viable insta-messaging alternatives

Sadly you hit the nail on the head regarding the social media “network effect”… I also came from a non-US country that has been dominated by an instachat app that doesn’t respect privacy whatsoever, but good luck convincing a group of ppl to switch to a different software. Sooo… most likely even if you really do get permabanned from Whatsapp, ppl you know in real life might just keep using Whatsapp without you anyway

But anyways, if you don’t mind giving a bit of a white lie… the excuse you gave (“permabanned from Whatsapp”) actually doesn’t sound to bad to me IMO

Find a way to scrape user data from a popular WhatsApp group and their algorithm will probably ban you

In my experience, I find it difficult to change what communication network I use to talk to each friend of mine. This has been especially difficult for networks that don’t use a phone number to identify people. For a few relationships, we are beginning to shift to a new network (in part due to following advice and the fact that we’re passionate about security), but most relationships get “stuck” on whatever network we first used to communicate.

So far, my solution has been to do a complete hard reset: I told people that I’m changing my phone number and that my contact information is available from my website (which is just a static page hosted for free using a public Git forge website) and that I’m not sharing my phone number with anyone who knows what my legal address is (since if they really need to get in contact with me, they can just show up or send me mail, and if they have any technological problem, I’d give them an old laptop I have and help them set it up and/or let them use my WiFi to bootstrap getting their own internet connection). After I did that, everyone who actually talks to me regularly set up their phones so that they can contact me using networks I actually pay attention to. I believe part of the reason this was effective is that I usually wouldn’t communicate using SMS or the public switched telephone network even if someone tried to contact me using them and would instead wait to talk to people until we met in person at regularly scheduled events, and it’s well known that depending on the public switched telephone network makes me uncomfortable. Also, I am much more communicative using the networks that I’m comfortable with, and when I point that out to people, they agree.

Hopefully the “hard reset” method works for switching between Internet-based networks rather than only from the public switched telephone network, but I haven’t tried that yet.

In general, to transition people from using one network to another, I would describe how to contact you using a profile for an internet service you’re comfortable using (for me it was a static website, but it could be anything that has high uptime and can be updated (like the “About” field for an Mbin profile or a LinkedIn profile)), and then give that profile provenance (like by linking to it from an “About” section or changing your display name to be a URL for your “contact me” profile), and then tell people that you’re not going to send messages using networks that you don’t like using. That means that people who actually want to contact you will still be able to figure out how to do so, even if it’s been a long time since you stopped using the old communication network.

In the future, I’ll avoid sharing any contact information directly, and instead I’ll share the URL for my static website (which is essentially just my name (so it’s unlikely anyone will forget about it)) and help anyone that’s actually interested in talking to me set things up. This means I avoid advertising networks that I don’t actually want to use, so even if a new relationship still gets “stuck” on a particular communication network, it will be one that I’m comfortable with using instead of one that I’m not comfortable with using, and people will know how to get in contact with me in case something changes.

People might get real if some whistleblower dig up some deep $hit going on inside this Mordor. Until then what you can do is install some apps that will send automatic responses every time you receive a message, saying that you’re done with the Eye of Sauron