Published at 28-02-2025
Recently, a friend switched from WhatsApp to Signal. They made a very good case — with sources — for leaving Mark’s enormous ecosystem in favor of Signal. We were reluctant right away, and with two small kids to take care of, I just didn’t make the time to check out those sources.
Honestly, I even forgot about it.
Then one day, after sending a message in our WhatsApp group chat, I realized: “I’m so brainwashed into using WhatsApp — it’s actually insane!”
That got me thinking: how hard is it to switch entirely from WhatsApp to Signal? Were our concerns valid? Change doesn’t happen by waiting around, so I decided I needed to do something myself.
Just a quick note: my motivation is mostly experimental rather than a protest against WhatsApp, although I do believe that using less Meta-related stuff is a very good thing.
I plan to create a group on Signal and try to move everyone from WhatsApp over to the new Signal group. I’ll also start personal conversations on Signal and encourage others to make the switch.
To motivate people, I’ll send the following message to a group (with the goal of one per day):
I'm doing an experiment where I’m trying to move completely away from WhatsApp and use Signal instead. You can read more about it here: Moving from WhatsApp to Signal: Day Zero. To make things easier, I’ve created INSERT GROUP NAME on Signal to replace this group and will add you there if you have Signal. Here’s the Signal group chat link so you can join if you don’t have Signal yet: INSERT SIGNAL GROUP LINK HERE.
Some groups are smaller than others, and I believe that smaller groups are easier to transition, so I’ll start there. In my case, many groups have overlapping members, so I hope that as more people make the switch, it will become easier to move everyone over completely. I’ll probably leave some old or unused groups and not recreate them on Signal.
On a personal note, I've also replaced WhatsApp with Signal on my iPhone dock in hopes that this prompts me to use Signal first.
In this blog, I’ll keep track of the progress — useful for myself and hopefully interesting to others. Here’s how I’ll measure the progress:
To keep it simple, I’ll add new blog posts regularly and track the progress in a separate section. You can read the first one here: Moving from WhatsApp to Signal: Day One