I love signal!
It’s best to be under the radar and incognito.
You can use just about anything but the best idea - for whatever method you use - is to have a code language or set of symbols so that even if someone is spying on you and can see what you’re entering in a text, they won’t be able to make sense of it. (I always like the simplest field tactics.)
For example, you could pick a different subject every day such as “next weekend’s block party” and just enter in a bunch of random gobbledygook about who’s going to bring the salad and so on, but the accompany this chitchat with emoticons or turns of phrase that describe the scene. Three pumpkins in a row with a series of numbers “three unknown subjects jogging seen on this block” and so on.
Telegram or WhatsApp- both work well.
Signal is peer-to-peer. No middleman. Communications are encrypted in transit and at rest. The others have central servers where your data could be stored to be parsed later.
Stick with signal.
One defensive shooting group I am in uses ‘Slack’, but I actually dont know if that has encryption. Signal has encryption and is peer to peer as others have said.
What’sApp is crazy with the settings you have to tweak, and there is a belief it is remotely monitorable by Facebook, its owner, ostensibly just for advertising purposes.
Signal is the best. End-to-end encryption and the ability to configure disappearing messages. It used to be that Android phones could set Signal as the default SMS app, but no more, as a safety feature. It was nice to use Signal as the standard messaging service on your phone, which did not require the other user to have Signal installed. But that is changing, so both sides need to install Signal.
Whatever is the lowest barrier to entry, initially. Survey your neighbors’ preferences and go with the majority. Once you gain critical mass, you can introduce secure comms, mesh network etc. Well, that’s one theory. Another theory is that if you have some onboarding friction, you will weed out a certain class of neighbors.
I like Signal and use it daily, but it can give people a false sense of security. Most media are vulnerable to social engineering attacks, including Signal. What good is end-to-end encryption if a bad guy gets access to your unlocked device?
Signal... started by Brian Acton, who was one of the founders of Whatsapp. Whatsapp was bought by Facebook and Acton didn’t like the direction of it within Facebook, so he left.
Just use the regular chat that comes default since it will use phone numbers and not Signal or Whatsapp accounts.
I don’t know about WhatsApp other than I think it’s connected to Facebook.
Signal, OTOH, has both encryption and the ability to set messages to delete after a certain amount of time — e.g., messages disappear automatically and are theoretically not recoverable when they are more than 1 hour, 1 day, 4 days, 1 week, 1 month old, whatever.
As others have said, though, nothing stops someone from looking over your shoulder or one of your neighbors taking screen shots of Signal messages.
Signal, because privacy is good.