In my local community, we have a WhatsApp group for mutual help and services / goods exchange, the rule is no money, so it’s mostly populated by leftists more or less open to understand the problematics of internet privacy (for context). There are a bit more than 350 persons.
Today, someone sent a message telling everybody that he’s leaving Meta products for good, thus this group. A few other persons complained about meta, then I suggested that we could all leave WhatsApp and go on Signal and I briefly explained the network effect by saying that if no one uses signal because nobody is on it, then no one will ever use it if nobody takes the first step.
And this argument worked because an admin just created a signal group! More than 50 persons already switched!
Obviously the WhatsApp group will not be abandoned right away, but it has been decided that both groups will be used for now, then we’ll see at the end of the year which group we abandon.
I really see hope in that kind of events, because if I managed to make more than 50 people switch, a portion of them will do the same for their other groups and family / friends.
I plan on hosting little conferences with this group on the libre culture and the attention economics, so hopefully I’ll convince all of them that it’s the right thing to do!
It is generally best to keep an entirely separate account for professional dealings so such things are segregated, at least that’s what I do
Signal as a zoom replacement would be great but a big part of the deal would be the necessity for hipaa compliance. I would imagine a huge part of what keeps zoom alive is financial injections from telehealth provides like myself that need a platform that is hipaa compliant that patients understand. EMR software often comes with a telehealth platform built in nowadays but it tends to not work as well and confuses the tech illiterate who got trained on zoom during COVID years.
I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff they have to do on their end to be hipaa compliant that I’m ignorant of but the primary thing is that they have to share a document called a business associate agreement (baa) with me that essentially says they will take meaningful steps to appropriately safeguard any protected health information and makes zoom liable if a breach of their systems exposes PHI.
This is why telehealth can’t (technically, people still do it) occur over teams, skype, discord, facetime, hangouts, etc. google, apple, microsoft, etc have no interest in taking on that liability.
The difficult piece will be challenging zooms pricing. They offer healthcare zoom for $15/mo with BAA. There are better deals though, doxy.me does it for free (they claim this is subsidized by paid account which I believe because they are substantially more than zoom starting at 35/mo).
Would be a great way to get them a revenue stream too. I don’t know anyone who practices heavily telemedicine that relies on free solutions; the only ones I know that utilize the bundled emr components or the free doxy.me service are clinicians that mostly practice in person and only do a small handful of telehealth sessions a month, like under 10% of their total billing. For people like me where it’s 50-100% of their billing it’s almost always a paid subscription. more reliable, tax deduction, and access to support
Jitsi works really well, and the developers seem to have made an effort to have it work well on any platform, even mobile browsers and PSTN. I’ve always found it the lowest friction teleconferencing method for all types of users.
It’s self-hostable, integrates with SIP, and 8x8’s commercial offering mentions HIPAA, BAA and GDPR.
Based on a very brief glance at this it looks like I would be reliant on self hosting it to circumvent the need for a BAA (although the hosting company may still need to provide one, unless I literally hosted it from my house or something?) not sure
Will investigate further, had not heard of this
8x8 is the commercialized version of Jitsi, and they’ll do a BAA. They’re mainly a voip provider, so jitsi is rolled in with many other items.
Oh I see, I just searched the forums and the info there is sparse
Thanks
https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/pricing
(I have never used their commercial offering).
I used Signal for virtual sessions during the pandemic (the law allowed it then), and I would absolutely pay them monthly if I could switch back. I even thought about emailing them to ask about a BAA- as far as I know, their model means that it’s only paperwork that has to be done to call it hipaa compliant