Not affiliated in any way, but you should give Signal a try.
The hardest part with any IM service is going to be convincing your friends to join though. I wish someone came up with a good way to overcome this "critical mass" problem.
Also not affiliated, just an user -- but Telegram has a lot of momentum going for it. It's possibly more of a substitute for Facebook than Whatsapp at this point, but in chat form, with a rich bot ecosystem and great UX.
My wife and I tried Signal in the past and ran into situations where messages were lost or sometimes delayed by hours, some showing up well after other messages were, making conversations occasionally very frustrating.
Messaging apps are definitely one of those situations where I expect things to work all of the time, not just most of the time.
Feature wise telegram is definitely the best challenger right now. Signal is good but not as good. I wish it was better because of privacy. I like telegram too much now.
I'm really hoping that Chat over IMAP picks up. I use Delta Chat every now and then with some journalists who have it installed, and it just makes so much sense. We already have everyone's mail ID's anyway. Or at least I thought so. In countries like India, a large number of people have skipped email and gone to phone based services. So for Chat over IMAP to succeed over here it would need to have phone number based matching cos people do not use their mail ID's at all. Everything gets done over whatsapp.
I've told the important people in my life that if they want to message me, they will need do it through Signal. It takes 2 minutes to set up, I show them how, and tell them that I won't reply to any SMS.
Many switched, including the least technical people I know. A few did not. It's really not hard; you just have to draw a line in the sand.
As a result of everyone I know using Signal, it fundamentally doesn't matter to me if the "mainstream" switches. We're already all on board.
And then you end up in that situation when they didn't actually switch, but rather made you a favor and caved in to your self-centric demands and stubborness. Like with a tantrum-prone child. They still use WhatsApp between themselves, because that's what their dentist, car mechanic and a favourite sushi takeout use. They will also more eagerly reply to IMs if they are not sent through your preferred chat system. So in the end you technically made them do your thing, but the victory is hollow.
The problem is when one friend demands Signal, another WhatsApp, another Matrix, another Telegram, another Threema. These are all closed platforms and having loads of different apps installed which perform similar functions，to satisfy various people's dogmatic views is annoying.
Matrix is not a closed platform, and in fact the only one of the projects you mentioned that even makes an attempt to work together with other chat protocols and networks. It is explicitly open, not locked in to any single service provider, and making an explicit effort to not limit you to chat with only other Matrix users (despite how much Signal or WhatsApp works towards the opposite).
An average person will have pages of apps installed, but that would actually use only what's on the first page. So they have a choice of bumping something off their precious FP to fit my special app or just keep it where it lands after installation, on the back pages. And if it ends up there, out of rotation, it won't see much voluntary use.
If you really want to make a difference please try to make people to migrate to something open. Quicksy[^1], DeltaChat[^2], something. But not another, essentially closed platform.
I agree. However email metadata isn't secure, so that's a nonstarter. I'm rooting for Matrix but thusfar Riot's UX to get an encrypted conversation going leaves a lot to be desired. No way are the non-technical people I know going to be able to do that. Signal "just works" with secure defaults, so that's the best we've got for now.
> I've told the important people in my life that if they want to message me, they will need do it through Signal. It takes 2 minutes to set up, I show them how, and tell them that I won't reply to any SMS.
I've done the opposite: there's no way I'm going to install a messaging app, and everyone I care to interact with knows they need to either use SMS or email to reach me. Everyone's been perfectly fine with that.
WhatsApp itself started as an obscure chat application. They nailed the simple SMS-like experience without high SMS fees, and that was enough for mainstream users. No reason people won't jump ship when WhatsApp loses that core experience.
It's still going to remain the same. Whatsapp is too big to fail, perhaps people in the US just don't comprehend how big of a user base Whatsapp has around the world.
> WhatsApp itself started as an obscure chat application
It actually started as a one-line status app, a bit like finger for the mobile era. Hence the name.
It was only when they discovered that users were interactively chatting by changing their status lines in response to each other that WhatsApp pivoted to full chat.
A good example of adapting to improvised user behaviour.
The hardest part with any IM service is going to be convincing your friends to join though. I wish someone came up with a good way to overcome this "critical mass" problem.