I made it, I switched completely from Whatsapp to Signal. That doesn’t sound like a Herculean work done, but wait a minute: I also managed to migrate two WhatsApp groups. To explain why this was not a trivial undertaking, I’ll dig a little.

What is missing: In the rapid world of technology, there is often time to rearrange the many news and backgrounds. At the weekend we want to take it, follow the sidewalks away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.

I have been using instant messengers since they spread on a larger scale, roughly since 1996 / 1997. ICQ, AOL, Yahoo, MSN – I had them all and more, there was a lot of mess on the desktop. The solution was Adium, where accounts from different providers could be gathered under one roof, everyone could continue frying their extra sausage and still reach me. The matter was clear on the cell phone, SMS was sent and received with it.

About ten years ago Whatsapp came onto my cell phone , which was no longer an old-style cell phone, but an iPhone. Whatsapp offered itself as an alternative to SMS messages, because at that time they still cost something per piece; That could add up to a lot in intensive SMS dialogues. Smartphones were slowly gaining acceptance among my family, friends and acquaintances, so that I could easily convince them of the free alternative. Yes, I was, so to speak, a missionary without a contract and helped ensure that the software could spread so universally. Already 2017 there should have been 2 billion Whatsapp users.

All the world on Whatsapp Everyone used Whatsapp, with the exception of a few around me who didn’t want to buy a smartphone or then, when they did have one thing, specifically refused to do this service. They continued to get SMS or a good old email from me and did not become part of all the many groups that formed on Whatsapp – digital outsiders, so to speak, who at most used messengers like Threema or Signal.

I had installed it at some point, despite my aversion to the mess of communication that I still knew from the desktop, and knowing that this Unified Messaging, as Adium made it possible, does not exist on the mobile phone. In Signal and Threema, it also became apparent that, apart from me, only a few of my contacts could be reached through them. Whatsapp developed into a giant and was consequently taken over by another giant called Facebook almost seven years ago, whose user base is now also in the billions.

It is similar with both: They bid for Communication and networking have indisputable advantages, otherwise they would not have spread so widely. And the more they spread, the greater the advantages of being able to reach everyone under one roof, so to speak. So I was able to write to people via Whatsapp 200, with Signal and Threema only a dozen.

Of those But the digital outsiders didn’t let themselves be confused, because they belong to the small kind of people who read terms and conditions and data protection declarations, maybe even completely. Their concerns were aroused at the latest when Facebook boss Marc Zuckerberg asserted shortly after the takeover of Whatsapp that the messenger service would remain autonomous. His company’s hunger for data was already too well known at the time.