In Europe Whatsapp is the default messaging system. Everything else is cumbersome. Sure Signal is better but only like 3 people have it.
Do what I did and send a message to everyone you care about saying “deleting whatsapp and switching to signal” or something like this.
It’s also a good way to weed out people who aren’t important in your life, I.e people who care about you will most likely install signal to keep in touch.
This is the way. I had a story in WhatsApp for 3 months every day with a picture that I am going to fully switch to Signal and Threema and won’t be available over WhatsApp anymore. As you said, people who want something from me will have to jump over their shadow and write me over one of those. And it absolutely worked, took some time, but it worked. Some people even have signal installed only to text me. The rest just calls or sends SMS. I am from Europe btw. and it worked even though WhatsApp is so strongly used over here.
The only downside to Telegram is it is centralized and you just have to trust them with no e2e encryption. E2E encryption is device locked AFAIK. I want Matrix to be as good as Telegram, then I could just completely switch to Matrix only.
Telegram becomes more and more popular too. They now have 800 m active users.
