this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.
I wish more people would use something that's not US backed honestly.
Centralisation is a curse.
I don't inherently trust Signal, and you have to because nothing they do is verifiable; I wrote a really hit-and-miss article about this before: https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/
part is in their 50s, tech illiterate by privacy-focused. Other part are colleagues (30s-40s) who are privacy focused. This is Europe (Germany) though - the landscape here is absolutely dominated by whatsapp by a huge margin.
Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result.
With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.
99%of the people I know and care to communicate with use signal or a group matrix and didn’t really care about the controversy, so I think the effect of what you are talking about is extremely limited in tech circles
Everyone I know uses WA, but a significant amount (~50%) uses Signal as well, most of those are not tech people. Back when they announced the crypto stuff, I knew next to no one with it, so that doesn’t really matter. I think only 1 or 2 people still use Threema in addition to the other apps.
Telegram I only know 2 users, one who’s American, and one who’s into conspiracies …
