[throwamon]

> they should care about [...]

And there's your problem. Regular users do not give a rat's ass about your shoulds. In addition, for example, I've never seen any serious UX bugs in Telegram, and I've seen many in Element. Regular users care waaay more about that than some vague notion of "reliability".

[rglullis]

> your shoulds

They are not mine.

It's not my data that is being mined and it's not my business that can disappear if WhatsApp goes offline.

Yeah, I'm fully aware that people generally don't care about any of that. Lots of people also don't care about their eating habits, the effects of their economic actions, etc, etc. But if they don't want to face the bad consequences of their choices, they should.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Just as FOSS should produce high quality, usable, popular, free software.

But it doesn't.

Your shoulds look an awful lot like a tribal affectation which the FOSS community uses to exclude non-technical users.

It doesn't matter if the exclusion is conscious (I suspect it isn't) or deliberate (likewise.)

The point is the exclusion happens. Self-evidently and empirically. Outside of the technical community FOSS might as well not exist.

If you actually want people to use FOSS you need to stop shoulding potential users and start making software that satisfies their needs in obvious and delightful ways.

Security and privacy are important but secondary features.

And access to source code trails at the end of the list. It's of zero interest - and even less use - to non-technical users.

[white_dragon88]

Therefore the idea will continue to flounder indefinitely, used by a microscopically small user base representing a microscopically small niche of the market. In effect it doesn’t exist and has negligible impact on the bigger picture. But at least you get to feel like you did the right thing, right?