This. After WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook (this predates any of the current political stuff, it was entirely about privacy), I tried to get friends and family to switch to something else -- Signal in fact as iMessage was a no-go because of the lack of Android support.
Out of ~30 people, I got precisely 3 people to switch. No one else cared, no one else wanted the hassle of switching. I even got a few comments along the lines of "but no-one I know is on Signal" etc. I ended up re-installing WhatsApp because I decided that the loss of contact with so many people was worse than any privacy worries I had at the time.
I managed to get people over to Telegram. Signal was a no go. It’s still a bit inconvenient. Mobile only unless you link a desktop is a non starter for me period. Majority of people don’t care about e2ee. They want an easy to use app that syncs everything and doesn’t require reading a manual.
Bad guys can and will use any platform that preserves privacy... but the default unsecured policy of Telegram was a bigger concern to me and the dread of having to request all contacts to enable end-to-end encryption (the instant messaging equivalent of having to explain to grandma why she should use pgp keys for privacy of her email communication).
Sad you got downvoted. Signal UX is 100x worse than Telegram and I probably can calculate it to prove this exact number.
I’m dreaming about Telegram client and Signal-like openness.
Right clicking on a conversation on signal does nothing. On telegram is shows the menu that if expect.
Signal takes many seconds to render the main window. Telegram opens in a reasonable amount of time.
Chat bubbles in signal reveal some hidden icons when you hover them, but have a separate right click menu when you click them. You basically have to guess which of both menus contains the action that you need.
Copy paste of images often doesn’t work on Signal. The voice clip button does nothing. It simply doesn’t work, but doesn’t show any errors or log anything.
I want to like Signal, but the clients are simply terrible, have bad UX and are full of bugs.
The only one of these I'm seeing is that there's no right-click menu for conversations in the desktop client, which does slightly violate my expectations. As to everything else:
Signal desktop takes 4 seconds to launch for me. That's a bit slow, but I launch it at boot and leave it open all the time.
I see a ... menu when I hover over messages in a chat; its contents are identical to what I see right-clicking the message.
Copy/paste of images into and out of chats works for me. The voice clip button works for me.
I'd be annoyed if I ran into a bunch of client bugs like these too, but they do sound like bugs rather than bad design. If you haven't used it in a while, they may be fixed.
To be fair, Signal has gotten a lot better and a lot easier to show people how to sign up. Back when I did my migration off FB Messenger it was a different story and Telegram was basically on par with Messenger
My initial Signal onboarding was long enough ago that I don't remember it. I do remember some general unreliability about eight years ago, but it's been solid during the past five. Several nontechnical people I've recommended it to during the past five years needed zero handholding.
You won't get folks to move, because people tend to "stay stuck."
Us tecchies (typical HN members) literally can't imagine what non-tech people go through, when encountering tech.
It's terrifying, humiliating, and intimidating. The reaction from us techs, does nothing to help, as we tend to sneer at them, and do everything we can, to humiliate them. Fairly typical bullying, but we don't want to admit it, because we were always bullied, and don't want to admit that we are just doing the same to others.
Most folks painfully learn rote, then get terrified of changes. This is why so many folks don't want to upgrade, or add new features. Just learning the ones they have mastered, was difficult enough. They can't deal with doing it on a regular basis (like most of us tecchies do).
Until we accept this, and keep it in mind, when we design solutions, we won't get much traction. People who do understand it, and design for it, tend to make a lot of money.
This is also why we need to introduce changes S L O W L Y, even when we feel that it doesn't make sense.
I had hoped the generations that grew up with the internet would learn how to use computers. Technical advantages like encryption and social advantages like federation tend to make things more complicated to use no matter how much effort is put into UX.
What might actually be cool would be a common set of design principles that become used across many apps and ecosystems - it would make switching much easier.
People are already used to the little "hamburger menu" three dots thing in UI (can also be three lines) often in the upper right for better or worse
Yeah, my gut is that of those 30K people on Facebook you might get a few hundred to join a new platform. But maybe not. It probably won't be very useful without the other 29K people plus (even if a lot of those are probably not very active).
Heck, we see this with Mastodon and Bluesky, their content is very thin in my experience (even if Twitter's is also thinner than it used to be at least with the mostly tech-related content I followed).
Yep, and this is what I have been telling people that the reason why Trump won is because the right cares much more about their agenda than the left. It's all just surface level virtue signaling for the left, which they will drop immediately if they get a good discount on a local mirror in a city group.
On the other hand, be openly LGBT friendly and see if a Trumper comes to buy from your store. Not a single one will.
Out of ~30 people, I got precisely 3 people to switch. No one else cared, no one else wanted the hassle of switching. I even got a few comments along the lines of "but no-one I know is on Signal" etc. I ended up re-installing WhatsApp because I decided that the loss of contact with so many people was worse than any privacy worries I had at the time.