I know why people do not switch to the Fediverse, or why they do not switch to secure messaging services, outside the reach of corporate and government oversight.

It is more convenient not to do so.

A lot of these free, open source developments, target geeks. Congratulation, if you're reading this, you likely have already put in more effort that it takes to sign up and use something else.

NO - Never - Get the idea out of your head, people will not give up convenience for better privacy. It is not in human nature and 30+ years of corporate and government oversight, should make that obvious. If it is not convenience, it does not matter how private and secure something is. Sorry, not sorry, those are just the facts. It is a hard pill to swallow, but swallow you must, so people can start focusing on making these many things, convenient.

I sometimes, although I cannot prove it, believe some of the developments behind better privacy and security, intentionally keep things hard, by design. That perhaps the FOSS world was infiltrated years ago, and that is why there has always been the pushback, on making things idiot-proof, graphically please, and simpler.

Mastodon and Misskey, for example, both use Activity Pub, but I should not need to copy and paste someone's username and manually search for them, to follow. It took years, for Mastodon, to make it easy for me to just stumble over a profile, and click a single button to follow.

If it is not simple, and easy, you're wasting everyone's time. Go code something else.

#Privacy #Security #InfoSec #InfomationSecurity #WhatsApp #Signal #Foss #OpenSource #Development #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Misskey

@shanmukhateja It is the chicken and the egg, argument. People use WhatsApp, because others use WhatsApp, and others use WhatsApp, because it is easy.

There were platforms, before WhatsApp. There will be platforms long after WhatsApp falls out of favor. But they will have 1 thing in common. Everyone will flock to that platform, because it is not hard to use and it works. Simple as that.

@Linux @shanmukhateja I sometimes get frustrated by people wanting to take the easy way out of everything but there needs to be avenues for both kinds of users. There needs to be ways for users that don't care to be technical subject matter experts and those that do.

@housepanther @shanmukhateja Corporations are smart, because they focus on easy 1st.

If you want people to adapt your product and service, it needs to start easy. You cannot come out with something that is hard, then slowly make it easy. Few, if anyone, will have adopted your product and service, by the time it is. You must 1st start easy, and then add features as you go along.

I wish more developers understood marketing and human behavior.

#Foss #OpenSource #Development #Marketing #MarketResearch #Mastodon #Misskey #ActivityPub

@Linux @shanmukhateja @housepanther easy doesn't mean fewer features; it means invisible features. Not having to read something, or do more clicks, or remember something. Easy requires a good library of "user stories" that are tested and benchmarked. It requires research, like watching someone new to the software use it for the first time. Easy is hard, honestly. But yeah that's how to be competitive.