There's one slight issue with Signal and it's that none of my contacts is using it and I'm not going to be the guy telling them to install it just so that they can talk to me.
In the EU by next year app communication protocols need to be compatible by law, it is mainly said that it would mean that whatsapp could communicate with telegram but I suppose it also should work with signal.
Should work pretty well even, since they use the same encryption protocol.
Won't happen though. Signal is very much against interoperability, and they're not big enough to be considered a gatekeeper that will be forced by law.
Fun fact I learned not long ago:
Even iMessage technically wouldn't count as a gatekeeper, since it is in fact below the usercount threshold the EU defined.
As Signal is open source, I guess someone could just fork it. It's not like anybody is really using it en masse as it is, and the kind of people who use it at the moment are also exactly the kind of people who would be happy to migrate to another service if they had a reason to.
Literally everyone in the UK uses WhatsApp, including 100% of my own extensive contacts. If I could download an open source rival app and still have full interoperability with WhatsApp users, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I've got Signal installed on my phone, but it's basically pristine and unused due to the lack of people to talk to. What's another app for the pile?
The only thing stopping me would be that literally no one on my contact list wants to do that... including work. I'm sure that's the same for most people.
Yeah great, then I can talk to literally nobody because I've never met a single person in my life who has signal, and now it doesn't even do texts anymore! Hooray!
I know it was, that's when I stopped using signal. And I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince a bunch of people to sign up for yet another app to chat in, they're not interested and don't care because WhatsApp exists.
Signal is this weird middle ground. I would prefer it if the person already has it. But if I am to try convincing someone to at least try another messaging solution, I would rather lead them to XMPP.
Also having to use either signal-cli or Waydroid is VERY annoying, because they arbitrarily decided to screw desktop over.
Legitimate question: would Signal or Matrix be the most desirable place to end up in a hypothetical post-WhatsApp Hegemony world? Or XMPP for that matter?
I've honestly never got my head around the difference in terms of the pros and cons of each.
I actually haven't heard of Matrix, it sounds like your knowledge on this topic surpasses my own!! I'm gonna research the things you mentioned though because I'm interested!