I remember trying to convince my friends to switch to Signal several times, and only a few listened. Then Elon publicly endorsed it (back in 2020 or something when a lot of people in my circles still saw him as a hero), and many of my friends joined. Some still use it. but yeah I stopped pushing like long time ago.

Some of my friends are geeks any way so they use it on there own (always brings me joy when i just meet someone and find out they use Signal, not this is how I choose friends though), and I use XMPP as my main messaging protocol (through a public server). But with family, it’s mostly WhatsApp unfortunately.

Can you share more about how you use XMPP? It sounds like nobody you know uses it, but you also said it's your main messaging gateway, so I'm confused about how that works. Like you have XMPP bridges to Signal and Whatsapp? Do you have a solution for SMS?