🤷 this is not my lived experience with my normies, especially since it was in the news. Love your posts, btw, big fan of your content here on Lemmy.

I agree. But I literally have software engineer bros who whine like little bitches about Matrix. I’m not stanning Signal, I try to Matrix where possible, but there are people in my life where Signal is the high watermark of what they will even try because they heard about it via Waltz accidentally putting Jeff Goldberg in the chat and there’s no account setup.

My sister and wife and parents aren’t going to use Matrix or SimpleX. The no account or password, you just install on your phone and it’s like iMessage basically sells them in a way I could NEVER get enough buy in for anything else. The way I see it, Signal’s primary problem is the metadata availability, but the government knows I talk to my family, presumably, what I want to hide is the contents, which are as far as anybody knows, E2E as long as you’re not using the Israeli Molly, but evil, app the Trump admin uses. I have tried since Threema to get these people on better platforms, Signal is a win in this case.

I successfully have multiple normies in my life on Signal. The no account/password is a big selling point. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than iMessage or Whatsapp, which are the two “this is good enough” options I see normies in my life wanting to use.

Oh, I’m not saying people can’t figure it out, but most normies won’t try on principle or something. Hell, I’ve gotten pushback from software engineers when asking them to do Matrix. Signal is known enough that most normies will use it, though, and it at least is not explicitly known to be centrally backdoored in terms of the encryption like a Whatsapp, which in my experience is the other option normies will bear.

Name a more secure way to communicate with normies. They’re not going to use SimpleX or Matrix…