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Comment by asiachick | Hacker News Reader

I'd be surprised if many of them didn't just come back. It's kind of hard to give up talking to your friends or being part of some group who communicates in a whatsapp shared thread

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Anecdotal: my tight group of 12 tech-unsavvy friends very trepedatiously migrated to Signal after the terms update and I said I'm bailing on WhatsApp whether you're coming with me or not. As soon as the group came over, I got tons of "wow, I like Signal better!". Then the outage happened and I was worried, but everyone stayed and I strongly doubt will go back. Though some do keep WhatsApp for other friends, I think our litte migration will actually cascade into more.

I'd agree with this - so many of my non-tech friends are now on signal and seem to like it. The traction that Signal is getting right now feels like its the classic word-of-mouth organic growth that snowballs quickly. I bet their engineering team is getting stretched right now.

> I bet their engineering team is getting stretched right now.

Last week servers were unstable for about 24hrs. But they did grow by about 10x in approximately a week's time, so that's not entirely surprising. I think it's more surprising that they've been so stable so far.

100% this. That's what I mean - I bet their team is just slammed with all that growth and pressure on their systems.

How technical is that group? My family isn't and they've noted a few times that Signal feels sluggish(therefore not enjoyable) to them and missing stuff they enjoy on WhatsApp, like statuses.

A group of my tech-unsavvy friends were enraged by the privacy policy update and decided to move from Whatsapp too, but decided to move to telegram instead, in spite of me warning that telegram is not encrypted and that if privacy was your concern you should consider signal. I bet they didn't read the privacy notice update and I wouldn't be surprised if they got their information from some Whatsapp forward that misinformed them about the actual contents of the privacy update, ironically. Turns out there's a lot of misguided and uninformed people too perhaps worse off now than when they used Whatsapp in terms of privacy considering telegram isn't end to end encrypted.

The shift over the last few days is that where WhatsApp was seen as the default way to communicate, Signal now became the default. I'm still on WhatsApp but reduced my usage by 95% in favor of Signal now that most of my thread or individual users switched to Signal. It will take time but hopefully WhatsApp will become irrelevant in the long run.

It was very entertaining seeing all my group chats move one by one to Signal now that there is a critical mass of users that agree that it is the right choice. I tried to make it happen in the past and it was too much a pain to convince people that Signal was way better than WhatsApp.

I agree few people are going to switch immediately and permanently, but I reckon they've created a long-term drain on their userbase. The policy change prompted me to finally download Signal (as apparently it did a lot of people), and while I'm currently using both side-by-side and will continue to for the foreseeable future, given the choice I'll be suggesting Signal from here on out.

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