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.
As Moxie Marlinspike once said, the fine line between facism and social democracy is choice. In order to exist in certain social groups, you have to expand your scope of choice to be able participate. In my experience using TextSecure/Signal for a decade and having convinced all of my friends/immediate family/significant others to use it, the majority of new people that I have encountered even with Signal installed on their phones, do not use it. It’s unfortunate, but most people only care about privacy to a certain degree, if at all. What I usually do is bite the bullet with SMS for a bit. If things are going somewhere, I eventually convince them onto Signal. If things don’t pan out, then not too much damage done.