alt Hacker NewsThis. 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.
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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.
Basic human empathy. It's kinda rare, these days.
I managed to migrate my family but no one else. So now I still have WhatsApp and Signal.
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.
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.