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Comment by opan | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the hostility toward F-Droid and wanting to run their app on LineageOS without gapps made me ditch Signal years ago. It seemed like the main gimmick back then was that it was also your SMS app, which IIRC isn't a choice anymore. So what's the draw now? Why would you not use XMPP+OMEMO or Matrix which work everywhere, don't need a phone number (at all, ever), and have free as in freedom clients and servers? It's insane to me.

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To put it simply, I need a messenger app to talk to other people. Most people I talk to are not programmers or very tech savvy.

Putting them on Signal requires me to convince them to download an app from the play store, with thr same name. The app is very similar to messenger or whatsapp and they're used to the functionality already. So many of my friends made an account so we can talk.

Anything more involved and they stay on meta's garden. Any successful messaging app needs to prioritize "normies" to get users.

Yet another person confusing "allowed" vs "required"

When I was in middle school, all of my friends used XMPP. None of us pre-teens were especially tech savvy.

did we know it was XMPP though?

Before the smartphone era, non-tech-savvy young people were still pretty tech-savvy compared to modern computer (= phone) users, who rarely step outside a few corporate phone apps and have even lost the concept of the file and the directory. You can't expect the same curiosity and willingness to make an effort from normies today as back in the XMPP era.

I feel like all that is true sometimes, then my 9-year-old neice shows me what she's been doing in Minecraft.

Well I bet you didn't have to convince them to leave messenger back then.

It's not that they are not capable of figuring out something more complex. It's that it's hard to convince non-tech savvy friends to switch apps and it becomes much harder if the alternative needs setup or feels unfamiliar .

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