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Comment by miracoli | Hacker News Reader

lol I'm from Germany and most people I know use for many years already :D

lol I'm from Germany and most people I know use WhatsApp, especially for groups, events, activities. Almost nobody uses Signal and even less use Threema. The place after WhatsApp is Telegram.

Lol exactly. Try to organize something in the school or kindergarten with “normalos” and try to convince them to setup signal!

Lol I'm from Germany and i think it wouldn't be a problem as normalos typically don't own mobiles in the kindergarten already. The "unnormalos" with mobiles - yes - but, if you're the kindergartener, then you dictate. But no lol - it's a pain. The mouse cant bite of the thread.

It is not so difficult to understand I was referring to organizing smth between parents…

I don't know, I don't have kids. May be just write what you referring to in first and not to expect others with different scopes of experiences to understand what you meant? The best thing about languages is the possibility to exactly formulate, so there's no misunderstanding possible.

Just about everybody I know uses both. The pattern I see is that groups associated with some entity like a company or a club are on signal, because at some point (before Musk took over as chief billionaire villain) it became a thing to not have your brand associated with Meta, while many groups on the more the friends&family end of the spectrum remained on Whatsapp. And 1:1 conversations are simply on whatever messenger they started on. Which is super convenient, because of the way the Android multitasking model works (and I suspect it's similar on the other side?). Far more convenient to switch between a Signal, a Whatsapp and the occasional Facebook Messenger than between two WhatsApp groups, worse if those are Whatsapp groups with a channel hierarchy.

(Telegram: even just having it installed would be seen as a political statement, it's where the weirdos congregate to antivaxx and flatearth and reinstate monarchy or whatever they do)

That hasn’t been my experience. A few tech-savvy people and those close to them may use alternatives, but even then, it’s usually just for groups where someone refuses to use WhatsApp. For everything else, they still rely on WhatsApp.

On top of that, nearly all groups related to kindergarten, school, or various clubs use WhatsApp, and there’s practically no way to convince them to switch. If my wife weren’t in those groups, I’d have no idea what’s going on.

I'm from Germany, too. This heavily depends on your social environment. There are milieus where Signal is ubiquitous and there are mileus where people don't even know what Signal is. But I think most people live in the latter.

My experience is absolutely the 2nd group.

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