The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told.

That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset.

For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1]

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429

[1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...

Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though

> the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.

Not really "the vast majority" ...

I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close".

So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure.

Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.

You don’t need everyone to change, the commoners imitate the elite.

Who will the masses ultimately follow: solitary tech savvy geeks who warn of naked emperors? Or armies of corporate-sponsored feel-good social influencers who entertain by promoting only themselves and the fad-du-jour?

I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.

The masses will do the easy thing, signal was made and adopted by WhatsApp for example.

The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.