Comment by augment_me
11 days ago
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
You are asking for too much sadly.
I agree with you but I also understand your peer group.
WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.
Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.
iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.