I know this is offtopic but why are people pushing Whats App? They could have used Signal just as well. Privacy literacy seems to be neglected so so much.
I've been thinking about this throughout the day and I'm not sure that I agree that Signal is a good candidate for this kind of communal group.
Firstly, Signal doesn't have a way of separating topics. Sure, you can have multiple groups that are loosely linked together but it's not really seamless.
Secondly, Signal's permission controls are lacking. Let's say you have a Signal group dedicated to posting meet-up details. You'd only want to allow trusted participants to be able to post. This can be done in Signal by making it so that only admins can send messages. However, admins can strip other admins of their role which means one rogue user can ruin the group.
With that said, I completely agree that WhatsApp really isn't ideal from a privacy standpoint. I especially dislike the fact that any participant can find out the phone number of anyone else.
I'd personally prefer something like Matrix for this purpose but onboarding strangers onto Matrix just sounds like a real nightmare.
It's likely the path of least resistance. Many people have whatsapp and it's far preferable to sms. Significantly fewer people have heard of signal, let alone have it installed. And privacy literacy, for a neighbor group chat?
