this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Proprietary servers is still proprietary software
Don't let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement
I agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there's still one problem.
Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc) This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not "perfect" it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.
I've been using Signal for years and my database was getting really bloated with media, attachments, etc but I didn't want to delete it all. I used this and it's incredible:
https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
Just make a backup from within signal, copy that backup file to your PC, then run this tool. The commands I used make an HTML webpage that looks just like the signal messenger, along with a way of searching your messages. You can choose different commands to export however you like.
I used:
So while this doesn't help you move off your current messenger, you don't have to worry that your data/messages will be lost in Signal.