The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Inste

The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told. That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset. For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-vote-for-interoperable-messengers/209942/ https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...