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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 25 Oct \ on: "I'd quicker abandon bitcoin and go back to fiat!" bitcoin
As the one South African that hasn't used WhatsApp since before it was bought by Facebook (before it was Meta), thank you for sharing my frustration so accurately!
What has "worked" for me to get people onto Signal is a two pronged approach:
- Refuse to install WhatsApp or anything else. If you want to contact me, do so on Signal. If you don't want to use Signal, I guess you don't really need to contact me.
- Challenge their unwillingness to install Signal. Many will complain that they don't want to install yet another app. To them I ask to open their phone, so we can have a look at what apps they have installed. I bet them that there are more than a few useless ones, and perhaps even a few actively harmful ones. If they're happy keeping those, why would they mind installing another one? Especially when it holds some real benefits to them. No-one has ever taken me up on that bet. Most install Signal.
I put "worked" in quotes, because obviously it doesn't always work. It has worked in all the cases I care enough about though. My entire family and just about all my friends are on Signal.
Then I found the local Bitcoin communities, with all of the interesting players already on Signal. That's really great. To my surprise I still find that those very same people - active Signal users - will still use WhatsApp, even for technical projects, rather than insisting that the one or two non-Signal users install Signal.
I sincerely don't understand how a community that holds sovereignty as a prime value, is so quick to capitulate to these network effects. On services that do not share our values. And I don't mean just WhatsApp. I mean GitHub (Microsoft) for development, Google email, docs and mailing lists, Xitter and other Big Social, etc. And all of that when perfectly good substitutes are readily available.
Sure, we need to account for the network effect and meet people where they are. But aren't we also supposed to show them a better way, like we're doing with Bitcoin?