I am soon moving out for university and am going to meet a bunch of new folks. But I was wondering how do you go about approaching this with privacy in mind?
It is a little bit whonky to ask someone you just met to download Signal, if it is a group of people then it is more acceptable, or like how do you keep in contact if they don’t use any of the messaging platforms you use such as Signal and Telegram, and if you don’t use any of the ones they use such as Whatsapp or Instagram DMs (yes zoomers in the US use these) or Snapchat? Do you just use SMS where videos are absolute shit quality and you have no privacy there either?
Let me know how you deal with this issue.
I made a separate user profile just for my social pwas since I use grapheneos. They’ll probably use discord or whatsapp so treat it like a public forum, stick with alias emails, fake info when creating, an always on vpn, and within a browser thats has privacy hardened features. If they want to talk more privately like through direct messaging and you trust them then try to convert them to signal otherwise simplex works too if you dont trust them with your personal phone number
Edit: Im not sure how instagram is these days but I guess you can make a burner using the same steps I described just dont actually post anything and dont add any identifying info haha. Have fun and good luck on the friend search