Just to add another useless anecdotal data point along with the rest: so far in the past month I have seen the bulk of my daily messaging contacts in the UK joi

Just to add another useless anecdotal data point along with the rest: so far in the past month I have seen the bulk of my daily messaging contacts in the UK join Signal. Most of my existing conversation groups are still on WhatsApp but new chat groups are starting on Signal instead. Where a request of 'can we do this chat on Signal?' would have been greeted with confused 'what are you talking about?' responses in December are now either not a problem or being answered with something along the lines of 'we would, but <X> is still only on WhatsApp'. This is not just techies, but parents in my kids school, biz contacts and investors, and even my retired parents who now use signal to chat and exchange photos with the rest of the family. It is not much now, but that sound you hear above and those small chunks of rock and ice bouncing past might just be a growing avalanche. Social networks have faced this sort of threat before. Sometimes, like Google+, it fails to catch on and reach critical mass, and sometimes MySpace finds itself on the wrong side of the switch to a new default and disappears.