That's reasonable, I suppose I'm lucky to have a friend group that universally prefers open source sorftware to good UX -- there was never really a question for us.
It's a little eye opening to me that anyone could have a friend group that "universally prefers open source software to good UX".
I have and use Signal with some friends, but there are also loads of people I communicate with who couldn't even tell you what open source software is, let alone articulate a preference for it over good UX.
Are all of your friends software engineers and/or technophiles?
I don't have many friends, TBH. I've got 2 friends who use normal SMS, and a group of 6 friends (not including myself) who use Signal; of those, three of them are software developers and one of them uses R at work though software development isn't her primary job. The other two are probably more aware of open source software than they would otherwise be due to peer exposure. It's also worth noting that one of my developer friends got the rest of us into programming, though three of us had been running Linux before that -- it's not that I've disproportionately made friends with software developers, it's that a group of people I'd been hanging out with for years assimilated a software developer who converted the rest of us. There may have been some MDMA involved in that.
Edit in case of potential ambiguity: s/a couple of/2
When all your friends are already using Facebook and you start telling them to use Signal instead... well, I can tell you from experience that it's almost impossible to break the status quo.
What has happened to me is that usually there's 1-2 persons from each friend group who care enough that they will relay information to you through Signal.
I still don't have a friend group that is 100% Signal. For that to happen, more than 50% of the group would need to care enough about privacy to completely abandon other communication channels and accept the cost of switching platforms. The rest would probably follow. In reality, I don't have a single non-tech friend who would give a fuck about encryption. You tell them about Signal and they go "cool", that's it.
I like the command line and it doesn't surprise me that other people do too. What surprises me is that there are people where an entire friend group universally prefers open source over good UX, since plenty of my friends couldn't tell you what the terms "command line", "open source", and "UX" mean.
Because everyone uses it. Once a social app becomes mainstream it gets a giant advantage due to the amount of inertia needed to switch entire social circles to a new platform.
Most new social platforms that make it big don't really take over older ones, they just grab a younger generation - usually just by being the network their parents aren't in.
You don't understand why people use a communications app with 1.6 billion users as opposed to one with likely less than a million?
It's network effects
In my own anecdotal experience Signal ranks way below Viber (popular with migrants + expats), Wickr (popular with people doing illegal things and corporate executive scheming), Telegram (popular in crypto, scammers and terrorists)
The only real broad use of Signal i've seen is amongst journalists - and even there i'm not certain how much they actually use it or if it's just the "i'm crypto aware" version of a blue checkmark for their Twitter profiles
It's a much better app, user experience-wise. I prefer Signal for obvious reasons, but WhatsApp is easier to use (and has a much better web interface).
Not only are there network effects, but as you go through various cities in Latin America you will notice on the billboards that mobile service providers advertise "free" WhatsApp. As a result of the success of those ads, your contacts in that region will prefer WhatsApp to other media.
Let me come out and defend Signal
(I usually defend Telegram, but I don't think we should be unfair to anyone):
As far as I am aware no one who knows what they are talking about has come out with anything that says Signals end-to-end encryption is broken.
If I have understood it correctly an as long as that is true, NSA, FSB and the Chinese might be running the message handling together and there's still no reason to be worried that your messages will be intercepted in transit.
Disclaimer:
- as far as I am aware Signal is the safest messenger available for everyone
- even if all the above is true you are still trusting them with your metadata. I think they are good people. If you are scared of them, be aware that they know who you talk to and when. This is however true for any mainstream technology as far as I am aware.
- being good at crypto doesn't make them immune to bugs. There was a nasty vulnerability a few months ago that was remotely exploitable. Again, this is the same, or even worse for every other messenger.