It is for people outside of tech circles. Just having to locate an instance is a massive amount of friction. But you need to locate an instance and a client, and there are a lot of configurable options and things that can go wrong.
Signal is turn-key, easier than Whatsapp friction wise, encryption by default, open source, non-profit, and secure. I don’t like that their messaging platform isn’t more open and that they don’t have mitigation against, say, AWS going offline, but at the moment, they are the only app I have successfully migrated “normal” people to.
I think in the future, fediverse-esque tech will reduce their friction. Instead of managing instances, data is user-sovereign, instances never see non-encrypted user data, users automatically move between them, you don’t sign up you have generated signing keys that are opaque to users unless they want to see them (tech people), etc. Fediverse can actually be LESS friction than current social media people use, but that hasn’t been implemented yet.
It could be a technical reason relating to Signal.
I wish I had a better answer than Signal for messaging, but it is the best we have right now. Most people who are security or tech familiar are very disconnected from what ordinary people can use or are willing to learn to use.
We need tech that has sensible defaults, low user complexity, and minimal new user friction. Right now, that’s Signal.
Most tech I make these days doesn’t even require an email. I generate keypairs behind the scenes instead and use QR codes to manage identity. After accessing the service, I then can escalate with unobtrusive notices (Provide your email to recover your account, etc). This auto-account pattern eliminates entry friction.
Of course, you need bot mitigation so a privilege escalation can be used as a user progressively explores more capabilities. The technical of this is a bit involved but the end-user experience is very low friction.
This gets a user invested (they can see content and actually interact with it), which then gives them a reason to progressively use more features.
Just theoretical right now but we’ll see if it works for layman users. If someday people use it over Signal, then I’ll know.