Most of us living in Brazil do life on WhatsApp. It’s where we find apartments, share warnings, celebrate wins, and stitch together community in a foreign place. For Black expats especially, WhatsApp has been both lifeline and living room.
I want to be clear: I’m not here to take anything away from what’s been built there. Real relationships, real solidarity, and real support have happened in those groups. I’ve benefited from them myself.
But I’m asking us to consider building something alongside WhatsApp — something more structured, more permanent, and more protective of what we’re creating together.
What I’m Relaunching and Why Now
In January 2025, I quietly started building a private forum. Not as a social project, but as protective infrastructure — a space for people already thinking seriously about censorship, platform instability, and the need for digital sovereignty.
Then my life shifted faster than expected. I left the US and moved to Brazil. Between visas, housing, culture shock, and simply surviving relocation, the forum had to wait.
Now that I’m settled in Bahia, this project feels more necessary than ever. Living here showed me exactly why we need it.
The Problem WhatsApp Can’t Solve
When I arrived in Brazil, I didn’t know anyone — well one person that I had met online — and she and her husband picked me up from the airport, and that was about that — because they have busy lives and I was determined to figure things out on my own (LOL).
Finding stores/products, service providers, etc. took enormous time, energy, and money. Much came through trial and error or being in the right place at the right time.
There’s no reason every new arrival should repeat that grind.
This is why I’m relaunching with a focus on a comprehensive, organized resource list. A living archive of vetted businesses, services, and community connections. Google isn’t enough here. General reviews don’t reflect the reality of doing business in Brazil as a Black foreigner. We need our own map.
But the forum is more than just resources. It’s about preserving knowledge that WhatsApp loses.
WhatsApp is excellent for quick coordination and emotional connection. But terrible as an archive. Important information vanishes into endless threads. Answers get repeated because no one can find the original post. Context disappears. Knowledge fragments.
A forum is built differently:
- Searchable threads organized by category
- Tagged posts you can actually find later
- Preserved conversations that treat our experiences as documentation worth keeping
- No disappearing information when someone leaves a group or changes phones
If you’re interested in joining, click here.
Why Privacy and Control Matter
WhatsApp is owned by Meta. We don’t control the platform, its policies, or how our metadata gets used. A private forum gives us agency. We decide who’s inside, how information is stored, what stays protected.
For people of African descent, historically surveilled and extracted from, this isn’t just technical. It’s political.
This connects to a broader pattern many of us know too well. When we’ve tried to trace our ancestry, we’ve found our own history sitting behind paywalls, controlled by institutions that were never created for us. We’re asked to pay for access to records about our own families while our current knowledge stays scattered across private chats and screenshots.
The forum is part of correcting that imbalance — keeping our stories, our movements, and our experiences in our own hands.
Yes, There’s a Learning Curve
Moving from WhatsApp to a forum will feel unfamiliar. It requires patience and new habits. But our relationship to technology, especially among Black folks, has often prioritized convenience over sovereignty. We consume platforms rather than build our own.
The current political climate makes this urgent. Platforms change policies. Information gets censored or manipulated. If we rely solely on corporate tools to hold our collective memory, we risk losing everything if a group gets deleted, a phone is lost, an account is banned.
We are becoming ancestors for future generations. The way we document our lives in Brazil — our migrations, struggles, and growth shapes what our descendants know about us. We’re the new record keepers. Many of us wished we could have spoken to our ancestors directly. In a sense, that’s what we’re creating for those who come after us.
How This Works
The forum isn’t open for free registration. Anyone wanting to join needs approval. This isn’t about exclusivity, it’s about safety and intentionality. I want to know who’s in the space and protect both people and information.
If you’re interested in joining, click here.
What I’m Asking For
I’m not asking you to leave WhatsApp. I’m asking you to help build something that lasts alongside it. Something that serves us rather than uses us. Something that honors our stories as sacred and our collective memory as worth protecting.
There may be frustration. But the benefits far outweigh the discomfort.
We deserve spaces that serve us, not just spaces that use us.
If you’re interested in joining, click here.