Yeah, but a sizeable increase is still very important. These days, Mastodon, Lemmy and so on have decently sized communities everywhere so that you don’t feel like just talking to yourself and a couple of friends anymore. And that’s kind of a tipping point.
“Mass migrations” happen slowly, anyway. A lot of people are very hesitant to leave big social hubs just because of the value there is in having so many people around. But in the end, you have to. We can’t stay on these proprietary social networks forever. Social networks and communication channels in general need to be non-proprietary, decentralized and open, without the ability of companies manipulating what you see and don’t see. And without risk of losing everything when the one big company falls. It’s a fundamental problem of all proprietary social networks.
Yes, though since it’s closed source, contains other proprietary libraries and probably was never properly audited (by a 3rd party) it’s possible (even likely, considering it’s Meta we’re talking about) that they keep a copy of the private key(s) and the messages, so that they’re able to decrypt them, and so still be able to gather the content, in addition to everything else, while they can publicly claim it’s all Signal’s protocol so everything’s “E2E”. And yes, the app also gathers a lot of other data (actual and metadata) besides the content of the messages (which Meta can’t supposedly see since it’s E2E, but I never trust anything from Meta). A Meta app (or Google, or MS, for that matter) should generate the same sort of privacy outrages and media/politics attention like TikTok does, but somehow they don’t. “Same shit, different country” was never so fitting.
Here’s a very good messenger comparison: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html