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Comment by pnt12 | Hacker News Reader

"But I'm..."

A specific user from a niche geek website, a rounding error, an anecdote.

I'm glad for those fighting against these walled garden overlords, but let's keep in mind we're talking about a side with thousands of people VS a side with billions of people. Numbers matter, and the fall of these giants is still far away.

If anything, the battle is starting from recent anti-competition and privacy concerns in the public sphere, which is a good thing, but the public remains unaware of these niche distributed tools.

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This is really tricky because of course if I point to my non technical friends and family who use my Matrix instance, it's possible to say well that's just because they want to talk to the technical people on there, except that's the entire point of the comment you're replying to: the technical few act as the opinionated minority that can sway the majority once a switching cost is low enough. I think it's possible to believe both that this is a potential mechanism for change and that as you say, any victory is far away.

Indeed, change might be ongoing, started already, and take 10+ or 20+ years

(Took Facebook 8 years to reach 1 billion monthly active users)

You are a technology influencer, according to the research of those large companies.

We are the ones who give the network effect to those services.

And those same companies have entire departments, with huge budgets, to promote their stuff, draw people into them, discourage people from using those other services, buy out influencers, etc

It's not a fair fight and it will never be.

I wouldn't say it's completely lost, but it's not far.

Signal was an impossible uphill battle on inception.

Nothing in tech is impossible — it's far too new.

Signal hasn't "won" yet. Though it's good that it's close enough to be a viable alternative.

On the other hand, isn't Signal backed by literal billionaires?

At first the internet was only used by weird geeks

And now it's used by everyone.

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