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Comment by foofoo4u | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to move my family off of WhatsApp due to these concerns. I've used Signal before, but I am not a big fan of it. I often have to re-register my devices to sign in, syncing takes a long time, and conversations do not persist across devices. I am perfectly happy using a paid service. Does anyone here think Discord or Slack would be a suitable replacement?

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Try Telegram. It’s as easy to use as WhatsApp for non-tech family and friends, yet has all the features you want out of an IM without too much of the bloat. It has native apps on all major platforms, and for the techies it has a solid API so you can do fun stuff like write your own bots.

> all the features you want out of an IM without too much of the bloat.

Except default E2E (which WhatsApp, Signal, Wire, Threema etc. do provide).

Yes but it does have e2e if you “want” it and for 99.9% of people that’s enough. The other 0.1% who “need” it are more willing to learn/adapt to Signal/Wire/etc.

I use Signal with tech friends, and Telegram with family/non-tech friends. I feel like the latter using Telegram is still better than them using WhatsApp, so I’ll take what I can get.

> or Slack would be a suitable replacement

Jumping out of the Facebook frypan into the Salesforce fire doesn't seem to be a particularly winning move...

(Which also raises the question, whichever alternative you choose, you probably need to evaluate the risk of Facebook (or some equally evil corp) acquiring them down the track. I wonder how likely Discord/Telegram/Signal are to be able to resist Facebook-sized acquisition offers?)

Signal is owned by a non-profit which cannot be sold to a for-profit like Facebook, Google, or Apple. The WhatsApp founder learned the lessons from the Facebook acquisition and improved almost every aspect when developing Signal.

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