[smeyer]

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?

[blotter_paper]

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

[emerongi]

Exactly.

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.

[lightedman]

"It's a little eye opening to me that anyone could have a friend group that "universally prefers open source software to good UX"

Plenty of us still prefer using command-line to this very day. Most of my work is still done on DOS 6.22.

[smeyer]

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.