It takes effort but I don't have to use WhatsApp anymore (last time was last year to speak to a Google employee I started talking with here on HN).

I have contacts in UK, Scotland, Germany, Norway, Pakistan, India, South Africa and probably a few more. They all have installed Telegram by now.

Of course I think we can do better than Telegram but at least I am not contributing to forcing everyone to give all their metadata to Facebook.

I wouldn’t be celebrating WA->Telegram as a great win, telegram is not encrypted end2end and stores the plaintext on their servers. So folks have switched from giving Zuck metadata, to giving Durov their messages.

A couple of things:

- back when I started moving groups WhatsApp wasn't E2E-encrypted

- one of those (Zuck and Durov) is a known bad guy and it isn't Durov. The other might or might not be a bad guy, but if he is he is truly hiding it well for now.

- also once I have managed to get people to understand that multiple messengers exist I hope much of the work is done already and the first groups have already been on Telegram so long that I might start to push them towards Matrix without triggering any bad feelings. (Yep, possible: the oldest one I've seen jumping from WhatsApp to Telegram with no issues at all must have been well over 80.)

it stands to hope that telegram does not employ a seemingly endless list of advertising partners with 'legitimate interest'

There are many E2E IM apps now. Of course you still have to convince people to install them first