That's a good question (and the downvotes are unjustified), but

> you'll never convert the majority of your friends/connections to use these niche messaging services

isn't true -- it's certainly possible, if you are pushy and refuse other apps.

I pushed most of my close contacts to use Signal and now they use that (among other tools).

Unfortunately Signal is not very good, because it's not very reliable (calls fail ~40% of the time, sometimes messages don't arrive) and the engineering practices lack (almost no tests, no CI, "bug bankruptcy" closing of all issues on the bugtracker) so I don't have high hopes for reliability to improve.

This made it harder to convert people, but it worked nevertheless.

Interesting! I might want to try and preach some app to my friends to get them all to go in to. Thanks for the anecdote!

I used to use Pidgin a long time ago now (in web time I mean) to be connected to multiple networks at the same time but there was a shift of tech stacks and companies slowly closed off their protocols or increased their security and Pidgin slowly got less and less support...

I use XMPP with everyone who is willing to join and am available via text, e-mail and normal phone calls for those who don't want to join.

However, it is a bit difficult with phone calls to countries outside of the EU: Sometimes I agree on using an old Skype account, sometimes I use my Nextcloud.

In theory, XMPP could handle that too, but in reality, none of my XMPP-clients has a great call experience (same old 'XMPP-clients need some love' song).

I have been moving very much to texts. The fear usually is, though, that someone might have to pay to contact me which is not ideal. Such a shame XMPP isn't foolproof for calls

I just use xmpp, text messages and phone calls personally. It's enough to keep connected with friends and familly. I don't feel the need to be more connected to people than that.

And for the times I need to send attachments, https://send.firefox.com or email (asynchronously), and sometimes https://instant.io (synchronously, for GB sized files, if the other party doesn't have a regular bittorrent client)

What’s stopping you from using multiple apps? You can probably convince most of your family and tech-savvy friends to download Signal/Jami/Keybase/whatever you might prefer.

No need to cut off people or uninstall insecure apps like Instagram to get to enjoy the benefits of communicating securely with some (rather than none) of your contacts.

> What’s stopping you from using multiple apps?

Wanting to keep my sanity? Not wanting to remember which conversation is where? Centralized logs? Device capacity limits?

The early 2000s solved this with miranda, pidgin, trillian. I wish they came back.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who had less than 3 chat apps, and I can’t really relate to not remembering which contacts use which apps. Also, is a 50-100MB chat app really an issue when you have a 32+GB device? Even if only 1 person was willing to switch then I’d argue it’s a very small price to pay. Especially when the alternative is supporting an evil corporation that violate people’s privacy.

As for centralized logs, I would like for that as well, and I think something like Volt would be our best bet.

> I can’t really relate to not remembering which contacts use which apps

Lucky for you.

> is a 50-100MB chat app really an issue

Yes. 50-100MB is multiple albums of music in mp3.

I agree with this very much, I already handle my phone with care in terms of making sure it isn't grabbing my attention.

Having to sift through 4+ messaging apps to find conversations here and there would be a nightmare.

I already have several friends who initiate conversations on 2 or MORE messaging services. The Pidgin era was phenomenal...

When you have gapped computers that need private communications there are still few options

Has nothing to do with friends