You are not switching away from WhatsApp because that is what everyone is using, not because it would be harder to use Signal.
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/wor... Just look at the map of most popular messengers worldwide, it's not just one.
I have never experienced a debate which messenger to use, and I have joined about twelve study-related group chats over the last two years. Same for personal messages. Some people have Signal or Telegram installed. After two or three messages for the novelty factor, everybody is back on WhatsApp. Because that app is open all the time.
I didn't like this, I didn't have/or want an iPhone, meaning I was excluded from certain iMessage groups and I hated using Facebook so I was implicitly excluded from discussions via Facebook Messenger. Most of my communications were over SMS as a result, so not ideal for my social life.
Seeing this as a problem I researched alternative message apps that had feature parity with iMessage, I figured any attempt to get people to switch would fail if I couldn't get this much. I also decided to bank on the latent frustration people had with Facebook, the company, meaning I had to scratch WhatsApp off the list.
I ended up with Signal vs Telegram. Telegram had the sleekest interface and good feature parity with iMessage. While Signal fell short feature wise, it supported SMS (at the time) and some of my friends were interested in it from a privacy angle.
Ultimately I decided to be realistic, so I scratched off Signal and chose Telegram. The goal was to get everyone to switch not just a few who were "interested", so feature parity had to stay the priority, privacy be damned. My pick was very important because I figured the likelihood of a successful migration would decrease with each attempt I made.
Finally having made my choice, I consulted 1 on 1 with my individual friends and family members who usually organize events, and convinced them to install telegram + join my premade group chats. I then nagged them to notify everyone that all event planning would now be via Telegram and that everyone needed to install it now. I think the Telegram invite link really helped grease the wheels here.
Finally after setting the stage with that, I individually convinced each friend and family member 1 on 1, via a call or in-person, to install Telegram and join the new group chats. I made arguments such as: It would unify our communication under the same platform and make everyone's lives easier, we can use Telegram surveys to more easily schedule stuff, it has all the same features as iMessage + more, I already got X and Y to join so I really don't want you to be left out, I can help you install it, etc. I found it was important to take full initiative during all this.
Finally, in only a few days I got two distinct groups migrated onto Telegram. We have continued to use it for 2-3 years now so it's safe to say the migration stuck. The only one who I couldn't get to join was my cranky uncle who wanted signal instead (first I had heard of this from him), but his wife joined so it didn't really matter anyway, he is simply excluded from discussions now.
So ultimately, you can get people to switch if you put the work in :)
So nobody but you ever got a say, it was all "me me me". You sound insufferable.
I can assure you, your acquaintances still use whatever they used before, and Telegram is the "weird person messenger" now.
I can assure *you* that my friends, not a "acquaintances", are much happier using Telegram than they were planning everything over a soup of Facebook Messenger and SMS. If I had it my way we would all be using IRC or Signal, but my compromises to ensure feature parity with iMessage was out of an understanding of what everyone desired, which was the core of what I was trying to get at here but I guess you missed that, not that I'm surprised considering your shitty attitude. In truth an insufferable person simply would not be capable of convincing 18 different people to switch to a new messaging app, no matter how badly they nagged them.
Many of my friends have actually thanked me for fixing the situation since it has greatly improved our ability to make plans and hang out together, which is a tricky thing to do in adult life where everyone is on different schedules. But sure I guess my desire to improve how me and my friends communicate makes me selfish huh?
Nevertheless, I saw multiple discussions (from non-technical people) about using signal or telegram in the last years.