Since I've moved, every time I see PGP being dismissed as too hard to use, I feel like I'm back in some echo chamber where people just keep repeating that and start to believe it.
Did I read that correctly? PGP is popular in Germany?
If so, I'd love to hear more please!
So yes it's popular... in the security community. In the Netherlands, it was also used, but usually reluctantly when the other party asks for it and it cannot politely be refused.
I also used PGP to communicate with customers from Germany but it's not that every German customer of mine uses it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about secure, end-to-end encrypted email replacements and have grappled with many of the same questions that Open Whisper Systems (the makes of Signal) had to think about. A centralized solution favors convenience, and will likely bolster adoption, while a decentralized solution will probably be harder to use and so won’t build its critical mass of users.
The person who comes up with a distributed, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted email-killer receiving broad adoption deserves some kind of very prestigious award.
Which is not to say it's not too hard. As my parents age, I notice their capacity for understanding new things decreases. It's not just technology, also games with new logic that they haven't seen before takes a while to grasp. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a four year old except that they understand and remember everything that existed 20 years ago. How they are ever to understand the concept of encryption, I don't know, let alone find the buttons to import a key from key servers.
For people below ~50yo, however, enigmail shouldn't be beyond them. The issue is that they don't know why they should care and therefore don't take the time to learn what it is.