As Seirdy notes:
It just keeps getting more relevant. WhatsApp, GitHub, Twitter, Reddit…each disaster worse than the last. The companies in charge know that the users will just take it after having their autonomy taken first.
You can, it’ll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Asia is like Line, and maybe some other Chinese apps that I will never install.
The interesting part is, email is still working fine as alternative. I didn’t install any other message app cause email and whatever next iteration of gchat for me is enough. ( I will probably slowly migrate to proton email and some 3rd party cloud storage hosting instead of just use gmail and google drive for photos.)
But yeah, for the less tech oriented population, overcome the hurdle of use different app is really huge obstacles. (Like my mom still tries to share things with me through Line app, even though I teach her how to use email a couple times. it made search for older shares much easier.)
Give your mam Deltachat, it uses good old email. It was a miracle for me, so that with people friends that didn’t want to use xmpp or matrix I just use email thanks to Deltachat. Some of them even installed it and like it so far. Everybody has an email so I can reach plenty of people with DC.
Thing is… the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.
For its many… many… well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.
We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.
Signal allows you to backup your messages. It’s under Settings > Chats > Chats Backup.
You can definitely backup and restore your messages with Signal. I think the app doesn’t allow to export to clear text, but you can use 3rd party tools for extracting the clear text from the backup, such as sigbak.
Plus, the app and protocol are open source, so if a feature has enough demand, someone will eventually implement it.
Possible if they respect your opinion, not really if you are a weird guy with a disorder whom they like, but are not going to take as a tech authority or something.
I already had this with recommending Linux (and other Unix-like OSes). All my attempts to even talk about it were taken with zero understanding, but once another person tried Fedora and liked it, this started spreading like a virus.
