Judging by the amount of people on my contacts list who are on Signal, I have a theory.

What is it? Spill the beans.

I think OP is implying that there may be more beans in the can to be spilled than there are signal users.

Probably signal occupies a far greater mind share than it's userbase actually warrants. If they say they have 10000 DAUs, more people will write it off as worthless rather than he interested in trying it.

My thought as well.

I have 8 contacts on Telegram, one(!) conversation. Meanwhile everyone from family and friends is at Telegram now and used to be on WhatsApp.

I wish Signal all the best: it is totally impressive, they got their incentives aligned totally unlike WhatsApp and to a larger degree than Telegram I think.

Personally I'm rooting for Matrix, but for now, based on my limited understanding Signal seems to hit the sweet spot where "kind of easy to use" overlaps to a large degree with "trustworthy".

In this video, Rob Braxman argues that most Matrix users use either Matrix.org or Element.io servers (may have gotten the names wrong). Matrix is a federation in theory but not in practice, so it's not good for privacy. What do you think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke8pXQQPaIw&t=623

I think the German Army and the French Police is already putting in place their own infrastructure and the company I work for might do so withing a year or two if we want.

Also, should anyone get banned from mainstream messenger because they live in the wrong country or have the wrong opinions they can run their own.

This is a huge step forward :-)

The main matrix instance is overloaded and slow so plenty of active people use other instances. Though, most people probably sign up on the main instance.

maybe ask the question there

Because they're the only app in the category that can?