The family group chat is the last thing keeping me on WhatsApp, and I hate it.

Mine was a breach notification a couple of years ago, seeing my actual phone number and address in a dump made the whole “your data gets sold” thing stop being theoretical. I did the usual purge afterward: deleted a bunch of apps, tried degoogling, hardened what I could.

And yet I still have WhatsApp installed, because my entire extended family lives in one group chat there, and I’ve accepted that I’m apparently willing to trade my metadata for not missing my cousin’s wedding photos. By my own standards I should have dropped it years ago. In fact dropped smartphones altogether.

Curious whether this is universal, what’s your holdout? The one app or account you keep despite knowing better, and what would it honestly take for you to finally drop it? (Or if you actually went 100% clean, how did you get your people to follow you?)

Full disclosure: partly asking out of genuine curiosity, partly because I’m doing some independent research on exactly these trade-offs.

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Not universal, I have never used WhatsApp to begin with.

I have a Tuta(nota) account I have been meaning to replace with Docker Mailserver using rootless Podman Quadlets, but I am currently undergoing a very deep conscious workload freeze at the moment. Throughout this year, I have been tackling more ambitious projects instead of optimizing my infrastructure and/or sharply pruning my digital identity, so I will get around to deploying more sovereign solutions later. No one I know follows my path because it is a purely execution-based sovereign discipline that requires constantly questioning every third-party dependent pipeline, and I have zero interest subscribing to anyone or anything else that prioritizes complacency and/or convenience.