Hacker News Reader

Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

Already being discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40710993

this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.

Threema being paid up front makes it harder to adopt for average uses. Signal is great option and wish more would use it.

It would be if signal would have resisted the temptation to go cryptobro. They didn't, and they lost all credibility as a result.

I wish more people would use something that's not US backed honestly.

Centralisation is a curse.

I don't inherently trust Signal, and you have to because nothing they do is verifiable; I wrote a really hit-and-miss article about this before: https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/

Interesting. Here it had some niche users, but got completely supplanted by signal, which is the clear #2 with the people I know.

Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result.

With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.

Everyone I know uses WA, but a significant amount (~50%) uses Signal as well, most of those are not tech people. Back when they announced the crypto stuff, I knew next to no one with it, so that doesn’t really matter. I think only 1 or 2 people still use Threema in addition to the other apps.

Telegram I only know 2 users, one who’s American, and one who’s into conspiracies …

99%of the people I know and care to communicate with use signal or a group matrix and didn’t really care about the controversy, so I think the effect of what you are talking about is extremely limited in tech circles

May I ask what country, age, and – as bad word it is – class is your threema-using social circle?

Because here it is mostly facebook/messenger, discord, instagram, and a distant whatsapp, in order.

part is in their 50s, tech illiterate by privacy-focused. Other part are colleagues (30s-40s) who are privacy focused. This is Europe (Germany) though - the landscape here is absolutely dominated by whatsapp by a huge margin.

I live in Poland, it's funny, WA never took a real foodhold here, we mostly use to communicate with people abroad who refuse anything else.

FB Messenger is the king here.

Weird, I had never even heard of it before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com