I can’t use them because I can’t convince anybody to switch with me. I talk to most people on discord and I’d rather move to using Matrix, but I can’t convince any of my friends or family or anyone I know to use anything else.
I just told everybody that I only reply on Threema and don’t use anything else.
My thought process was - if they can’t be arsed to use another app (which is an extremely effortless task to do) then they are probably not worth staying in contact with.
The 3 people that were most important in my life at that point got the app immediately.
After over a decade with threema I now have over 40 contacts there, mostly friends, some colleagues, multiple hobby centric groups etc.
I guess just start and don’t compromise and be patient
I just told everybody that I only reply on Threema
if they can’t be arsed to use another app (which is an extremely effortless task to do) then they are probably not worth staying in contact with
So if someone said you have to use their messagee of choice - Signal, Whatsapp, Matrix, FB Messager, Discord - you’d have no problem meeting them there because it’s effortless, yeah?
You left out two important real world aspects from your thought experiment.
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one person cares about a specific aspect of the messenger - privacy - and the other doesn’t care, they are just on whatever their peers told them to be on. So if their messenger happens to have the aspect I care about I’ll do it. Since they don’t have any such criteria I expect them to do it as well.
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If that person is important enough for me and doesn’t budge I’ll call or E-Mail them. Which is less private than an e2ee messenger, but more private than data harvesting companies.
This is pretty much exactly what I did. I said I will be using signal, and if you want to stay in contact with me, that’s how you will do it, because I will not reply to anything else.
