Feels like this could be a bit of Whatsapp/Signal moment, when FB/Meta was changing Whatsapp's privacy policy. Don't let a crisis go to waste?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-signal-users/signal-sees-...

> Signal was downloaded by 17.8 million users over the past seven days, a 62-fold rise from the prior week, according to data from Sensor Tower. WhatsApp was downloaded by 10.6 million users during the same period, a 17% decline. (January 13, 2021)

(the irony is not lost on me that @elonmusk contributed to the above frenzy: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153 ["Use Signal"])

Did Signal get any momentum though? I used Signal for a week before giving up.

Me and all my friends have used signal for years. What do you mean you gave up? I've never had any issues and it beats the hell out of text. Like I said, I communicate with probably 15 people at least daily consistently via IM and 3 of those are text the rest signal.

My entire family, most of my friends... I hardly ever get a regular SMS, usually it's spam or a company message.

Granted I did a little bit of work to convince them, but "you can use it on your computer and do video calls with your phone number" was good enough, even if vaguely inaccurate. It's much more functional than SMS.

But that's also in the US, I think other apps are more popular plenty of places which are just as much better than SMS anyway. Signal I think has good adoption in the US because the competitor was so terrible.

No. The momentum fizzled out. [0]

> The most common apps chosen as alternatives were Telegram and Signal, mostly because of their privacy and security features. However, almost a third of the participants that tried to switch chose to move to either Facebook Messenger or Instagram.

> 25.97% of participants wanted to switch to other apps but only 0.5% uninstalled WhatsApp ... If we translated this result to the entire population of WhatsApp users (approx. 2 billion), we’d be talking about 500 million users trying to flee from WhatsApp, and only 10k uninstalling it.

In this researcher's own words: "It looks like WhatsApp is the place to chat with anybody, making it particularly hard to leave."

[0] https://medium.com/@carlagriggio/the-great-messaging-app-mig...

That seems like entirely separate questions?

For instance I switched to signal and use it regularly, but keep whatsapp on my phone for a few contacts I might need a few times per year. Whether it is uninstalled seems like the wrong metric and does not say anything about signal usage.

Most young people in HK primarily use Signal now.

no chance. signal performs the same function as whatsapp. it’s nearly 1:1. mastodon and twitter are not interchangeable. there is nothing sticky about a free chat app

Its the same thing. Rises on the network effect, falls on the network effect.

https://joinmastodon.org/ claims 4.4 million.

How does that counter work with the whole federation thing? Also is that sign ups, monthly active, monthly engaged, daily active,...?

Add to that. I signed up years ago but have long lost my account. Furthermore, because there is no one true server, why not have multiple addresses on multiple instances, like you would with email?

Nope. 3.6 Million 'registered' and roughly 1 million actives. [0]

Still no match for the 217 Million+ Twitter daily active users I'm afraid after 6 years of existing.

[0] https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/

I've only been on mastodon for a couple of days, but it reminds me of the early days of twitter. The old twitter that I was missing. Not having 217M users can be viewed as a feature for some of us.

Each time an exodus happens in reality the users 'said' they would leave only come back after a few months. Mastodon did not gain significant retaining users after #deleteFacebook, #deleteInstagram and #leavingTwitter trended.

It is not "early days" and anything compared to being 'A viable Twitter alternative' other than Facebook and Instagram has only shown themselves to be a complete failure. Just like how Gab (another alternative) with roughly the same number of active and registered users as Mastodon also failed to be a viable Twitter alternative since that has instead turned into another echo chamber but including the undesirables putting off many users on Twitter from moving.

Mastodon as far positioning itself as being 'A viable Twitter alternative' after 6 years of existence has failed to gain any significant amount of former Twitter users or traction. After 6 years, it isn't early days.

> like a million or so, which is kind of disappointing compared to the size of Twitter…

My first impression of mastodon is that it's a lot like the early days of twitter. I kind of miss that era of twitter and am looking forward to moving over to mastodon.

Sure, but when you subtract bots and assholes from twitter’s numbers, it’s not so bad in comparison.