As a reminder, Signal is still awesome, is run by cool people who have been doing good stuff for your privacy for many many years, runs on your phone and your laptop and your dad's PC and your buddy's phone of that other brand ...
Main issue for me is that no one, I know uses any other app than WhatsApp.
I use telegram for piracy but wish people would move over to Telegram or Signal.
Majority seems to be stubborn on WhatsApp because of easiness and laziness.
It's not so much laziness as the reason you've given - everyone else is on WhatsApp. Why would I move to a new messaging app when I literally can't message the people I want to message on it cause they don't have it.
While I still use and sort of like Signal, I feel that dropping SMS support was the wrong choice and I don't like the direction they are going. They are also against federation which I also don't like. I've stopped recommending Signal to people.
I believe them when they say that one reason to drop SMS was that some vulnerable users were mistakenly sending SMS when they thought they were safe by using Signal. That's a serious problem where a person having Signal on their phone could cause them to expose themselves to attacks. That person's life is more important than my momentary inconvenience when my mom is using SMS and my friend is using Signal.
I really wish that there were better options; some sort of incrementally-built web-of-trust like the old PGP model. But right now, Signal is still in a sweet spot for me: yes, it's centralized, but it gets certain specific benefits of centralization while also credibly assuring that the server owners can't do evil with it even if they want to ... and they credibly don't. I can get my family and my housemates to use it, instead of something from Zuckerberg.
Because the pricing is fucking ridiculous for the ad free version of things. And even then, ad-free usually means ad-free for a limited time until the profit line starts to slow down.
The app market was different back then. No real alternatives, not meta owned, I think I paid 1€. Nowadays I wouldn't pay for any app other than a good Lemmy reader, I also use my phone for not much else anymore.
In September, Cathcart categorically denied a report from Financial Times saying that the Meta-owned chat app plans to show ads.
“The reason I qualified [sic] the answer is that there could be ads in other places — channels or status.
WhatsApp had talked about putting ads in Status a few years ago, but the company never rolled it out.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch it’s not currently testing Status ads in any country.
Meta hasn’t provided any details about when or if it plans to launch ads in either product, Status or Channels.
Until now, WhatsApp, which is used by more than 2 billion people across the world, has relied on its business messaging and click-to-WhatsApp ads on other platforms like Facebook for revenue.
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