It has been a long journey.
I have been gradually convincing my family, close relatives and friends to make the switch to Signal for over two years. I am already the “tech support guy” in all my circles so most didn’t really question it. Most of my friends are quite tech-savvy, and some even did use Signal before I talked to them about it.
This also filtered out some “friends” who were never that close to me to begin with. So, that’s a bonus, I guess.
Overall, my recommendation to others interested would be to tell people how much you don’t like Meta’s business model instead of the privacy aspect. I already ditched Facebook and Instagram many years ago, and this helped defend my point a bit better.
In my country nowadays you can’t even contact companies and services through regular phone number, you gotta message them on Whatsapp, and I mean, you use Whatsapp to talk with the guy from your neighborhood that fixes roofs to international banking institutions.
This is something I didn’t realize until I traveled outside the US. In some places, WhatsApp is the default.
I’ve always been very anti-Meta, and refused to get on WhatsApp until I ran into that situation.
Something that needs to be reversed as soon as possible.
It’s cool because online based chats have more features but are more susceptible to enshittification. A federated, online based, encrypted open standard like Matrix is the future.