During the time you were that, my son's daycare provider joined Signal. The network->tsunami effect is real and is currently happening in Switzerland. WhatsApp has burned their bridge to Swiss society, somehow. Shocking, but welcome.

Swiss person here. Over the last 2 weeks, dozens of my contacts (often total non-techies) have installed Threema and/or Signal. I've heard of a lot of family chatgroups moving away from WhatsApp.

WhatsApp has near-total market penetration in Switzerland. I hope this will change now, at least a bit. Until recently, you'd get strange looks if you mentioned that you don't use WhatsApp. (People sometimes assume that means you don't own a smartphone.)

That's curious, I thought that wouldn't happen anywhere Whatsapp already had dominance.

Here in Uruguay (South America) WhatsApp is the norm and you make all "digital errands" (even the grocery open markets and all kind of delivery services) with it. I have been annoying my friends and family for years to switch to Signal or even Telegram with little results and my obligation to remain fixed to it. Nevertheless, after this WhatsApp/Facebook ultimatum I was astonished to watch dozens and dozens of contacts migrating, and I knew it was my moment to delete WhatsApp before they get sweetened by the delay of the deadline until May, so they begin to use the other tools, too (I don't think the majority will delete WhatsApp, but it will be a great improvement if at least the personal conversations and contacts remain out of their claws). I really didn't expected to witness such exodus: people seem to be hypnotized by social media and Pavlov's bell -the dog is not to blame-, but maybe we could think that, although it takes a lot of time to appear, a critic mass is all that we need for a change. Businesses and government should be aware of that and don't take us for granted.

can confirm, i too am positively surprised that most people i meet are absolutely willing to switch.

Can re-confirm: the lady who brings my family raw milk just wrote to me on Signal instead of WhatsApp without me even asking. I'm positively drowning, happily, in this tsunami!!!

Same in Belgium. I don't use whatsapp, but had it installed. When I said I don't use it - people gave me weird looks and were annoyed. Now this has been replaced by a "oh so you use signal?" reaction.

The whole situation has seen mainstream media attention here, which helps a lot I guess.

> Swiss society

Of course. I was talking about an entirely different place with huge differences — from education to value of life (which is close to zero IMHO).

WhatsApp penetration in India isn't necessarily bad, given the size of the country. It gives a huge leverage to the Indian government: If they say they will block WhatsApp if they go through with the planned policy change, FB won't risk losing hundreds of millions of WhatsApp users.

Or they can go passive-aggressive: Mandate the exclusive use of privacy-friendly IM platforms for government and public services. If WhatsApp isn't compliant with the privacy requirements they set, tough luck. This will bring everyone onboard to another platform, and they can then individually decide if they'll also continue to use WhatsApp.

I am assuming you are either from here as well, or know about the country. Please tell me what would Indian Govt do if Zuck simply tells them they will get a tap installed at a place of their choosing as well?

> Mandate the exclusive use of privacy-friendly IM platforms

Ah no, you definitely are not from here :-) (no offence meant)

> Unless Signal brings social features that makes these people experience FOMO of broadcasting their lives on one more network

That's ultimately what it boils down to. Making an alternative messenger that people will use is one problem, but making one that people will use *instead* of WhatsApp is an entirely different beast. The former can be solved with new (non-privacy related) features, but that's not gonna be enough to overcome the network effect.

The really important question here is whether people really don't value their privacy that much or if they just don't know any better. If people really don't care, then there is no problem to be solved. If it's an uninformed decision, then this is not a technological problem but a societal one that can be solved with awareness campaigns for example.

Let's put it straight: majority of people don't give a damn on privacy. There should be a global pro-privacy campaign run by all of us to convince as many people as we can to respect their privacy!

Ok, it's only anecdotal, but if my little harmless gender-discriminatory way helps you convert more Indian Whatsapp groups then worth trying :). I've observed (in a completely non-scientific way of course) that in whichever groups that contains both men and women if a woman says "Hey all, let's move to Signal?", almost everyone will move quickly. If a man initiates that instead, you're going to get blank responses. So convince a woman in the groups ;)

> Penetration of Signal in real world is way too different from what it "feels" here on HN

But we should also remember most of the popular apps right now started with small bubble.

People like HN readers and techies is what going to influence non-tech people in long run.

Same in Brazil. Whatsapp penetration is probably 99% here - only paranoid hackers don't use it.

well i am that stupid guy who refused to install whatsapp. yes, i have heard that hundreds of times till now. even though the idea of "shadow profiles" my phone is already in facebook/whatsapp/truecaller DBs but i have never been able to accept that on a personal level. it just feels wrong doing it.

back in 2016 i decided to be the renegade and go to the shiny new telegram when everyone was over at whatsapp. took me years to convince 3-6 relatives to install telegram if they wanted to talk to me. wanted to avoid "whatsapp university" because everyone knows when unkills come to "chat". this meant that even today my messaging is on demand, if i want to talk to someone, i message them, reply and i close the app.

over the past month i have seen an explosion of "x joined telegram" and i told those relatives "remember how i made you download telegram back in the day, now i want you to get element because i am quitting telegram". that brought a few laughs.

my point is like yours. short of something catastrophic with whatsapp or facebook or instagram, people will not change because it requires you to download an app which takes 5 minutes. too much friction. /s

Just to add another useless anecdotal data point along with the rest: so far in the past month I have seen the bulk of my daily messaging contacts in the UK join Signal. Most of my existing conversation groups are still on WhatsApp but new chat groups are starting on Signal instead.

Where a request of 'can we do this chat on Signal?' would have been greeted with confused 'what are you talking about?' responses in December are now either not a problem or being answered with something along the lines of 'we would, but <X> is still only on WhatsApp'. This is not just techies, but parents in my kids school, biz contacts and investors, and even my retired parents who now use signal to chat and exchange photos with the rest of the family.

It is not much now, but that sound you hear above and those small chunks of rock and ice bouncing past might just be a growing avalanche. Social networks have faced this sort of threat before. Sometimes, like Google+, it fails to catch on and reach critical mass, and sometimes MySpace finds itself on the wrong side of the switch to a new default and disappears.

India is a huge market and there's a lot of people in India.

Isn't there a `made in India` alternative trying to get into that ?

> Penetration of Signal in real world is way too different from what it "feels" here on HN.

No, it's not that clear cut.

My only tech friend in my peer group is the one reluctantly moving to Signal while his SO and 20 of his SO's friends are moving to Signal. (sidenote: I asked about Telegram and the consensus seems to be "yeah but it's the united arab eminates, right ? no.")

> Isn't there a `made in India` alternative trying to get into that ?

Ok here's my proposed solution: 1. Be Indian 2. Create rebranded fork of Signal 3. Give it an Indian name and call it "Made in India" 4. ??? 5. Profit

> Isn't there a `made in India` alternative trying to get into that ?

All the alternatives I know are backed by for-profit corporations. So privacy concerns still remain. Few notable ones I came across are/were:

Hike (was shutdown last week) JioChat ShareChat

Although I advocate Signal over Telegram, it's funny when people equate Telegram to UAE when their tech team is in London, while they are only based in the Emirate for zero taxation.

Isn’t Signal run by some guy named Moxie Marlinspike who likes to be very secretive to supposedly protect his privacy? Signal is much more suspicious, IMO.

The CEO for a privacy-focused messaging app wanting to protect his privacy is suspicious...?

The leader of an organization that has a large impact on society, and potentially will have a very large impact on society and the world, being secretive is concerning and suspicious, yes.

Edit: Why? Because the public should know the people who have significant amount of influence in society.

This won't ever get anywhere.

The public doesn't know about Diffie Hellman or Brian Acton or Mike Schroepfer or Alex Halderman and yet here we are.

What else do you need to know about Moxie Marlinspike or Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape beyond their technical blogs, opinion blogs and conference appearances and the products they put out there ? To decide what ? What does it change regarding their work being done in the open ?

If you suspect them of something there's nothing in the world that they could say or put out that would convince you they aren't... what ? Why is being secretive suspicious and concerning ? What are you suspecting ? You already know more about their name and what they do and think that people who worked on covid vaccines and that has a significant amount of influence and society.

Again, why?

I'm from South Africa and about 70% of my family and friends have switched to using Telegram now with more people joining every week. Signal nobody uses unfortunately.