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Comment by usrusr | Hacker News Reader

Bummer for the users?

I'd say Zuckerberg is the clear loser in this story: what could be worse than failing to catch up with WhatsApp and discovering a new fundamental use case?

Failing, then spending an obscene amount of money on buying WhatsApp, then seeing a considerable part of that money enabling the Signal Foundation and watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger. Users are fine.

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> watching Signal eat up the user base of both WhatsApp and the Facebook Messenger

Is this actually happening or just wishful thinking

Telegram has made some impressive strides over the past few years (it's quite mainstream as a messaging platform and social platform in some countries)

I don't think I'd say the same for Signal though.

Idk, I feel like Telegram is viewed more like a subscription based twitter feed. It’s more about pushed updates to groups of people then communication between loved ones. (It’s also used a lot as a support medium, although I wouldn’t considered forced adoption for support or even notification as an indication of user adoption that’s like saying EV adoption is trending up while some areas almost force conversion).

Definitely happening in my little corner of humanity. Not happening as in usage of the Meta messengers has dropped to zero, but it's becoming more and more like "funny how this group is still on WhatsApp, do they live under a rock?" At least FB messenger has a tiny niche left as the way to communicate if you are connected on FB but haven't shared phone numbers.

Not happening here in the Uk - the world over here is still on WhatsApp.

Whatsapp is still by a longshot the most used messenger app across the world. The user you're responding to is just pulling a "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"

Definitely the latter

It's definitely happening in some circles. I was quite surprised to hear that my dad's reasonably active sibling chat group uses Signal, and we're talking about a dozen+ mostly technologically-inept people aged 40-70.

To give an example of how inept, my dad recently discovered that iOS Safari has tabs, and he's had a smartphone for close to a decade and uses Safari heavily. I have no idea what prompted them to switch away from WhatsApp, and before that, GroupMe (which they used for a while because it worked through SMS), but they did.

I keep hearing this - and I recall a slate of articles claiming "WhatsApp is dead, users are flocking to Signal/Telegram" so I looked up the numbers.

Signal has around 50M MAU.

Telegram has 500M MAU.

Messenger has 1B MAU.

WeChat has 1.2B MAU.

Whataspp has >2B MAU.

That tells you nothing about a trend though, right? We'd have to look at this over time to see if people are actually moving to/starting to use signal.

If you look at the data over time, you'll find that both Messenger and WhatsApp have grown MAUs every quarter since their existence. You're free to draw your own conclusion to the question.

Oh, I'm not claiming that Signal is taking over everywhere, just that in some groups of people it's becoming quite common.

Here in India, Whatsapp is pretty much a basic utility. A small vocal percentage moved to Signal around the time of Whatsapp's privacy policy furore. But anecdotally, most of them have moved back to Whatsapp because ditching it would mean ditching contact with most of their social circle.

I don't even get the idea of "moving" messengers.

Using several messengers is what enables competition between them in the first place. It's great for the ecosystem. All messages end up in my notification bar anyway, irrespective of the underlying app.

In my German peer group almost everyone is on Signal as well as WhatsApp. (... and Telegram, for that matter.)

Nobody "moved".

Bummer for the users who chose WhatsApp over Messenger. Many didn't want a company, like Facebook, to have PII on them, yet FB just bought it all up pretty much screwing these people.

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