[smc-discuss] WhatsApp and mental torture in school communities

[Pirate Praveen]

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 5:27 pm, Nandakumar Edamana 
<nandakumar at nandakumar.co.in> wrote:
> School communities are forcing WhatsApp on people who do not want to 
> use
> it, and the whole move to free software is being hijacked by the 
> overuse
> and mandating of WhatsApp in school communities. Anyone in this list
> knows how bad a reputation Facebook has, especially after the 
> Cambridge
> Analytica issue. Why can't they promote better alternatives like 
> Signal
> ('better' based on our current understanding). Besides, there are some
> people who don't like to use high-end technology at all, the ones like
> my mother. I've personally witnessed she being mentally tortured to 
> buy
> a smart phone and install WhatsApp, which, she'd managed to resist.
> 
> Of course the school community should embrace advancements, but only 
> if
> they aren't harmful. Better, they should promote libre alternatives 
> and
> provide options so that everybody can participate.

We can start with an open letter to IT at School director.

I think for managing courses, Moodle will be a better fit than using 
WhatsApp groups I think. Also Signal is still centralized (we can't run 
our own servers if we want to interact with users on official Signal 
servers), so I recommend Matrix, which is decentralized and we already 
run our own server at poddery.com.

I have started a cryptpad here 
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/CLrd8men4PdS4n9+iPs+OzBT/ we can 
add more points and finalize it.