Signal is not much better than WhatsApp or any other walled garden messenger without provider choice. Don’t waste your time and energy to move people to walled gardens. A better idea would be to use providers and apps that support the federated internet standard XMPP: https://joinjabber.org

You’re not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn’t realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.

Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don’t want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don’t think I’m contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That’s the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.

Either they’re okay with a switch and it’s easy or they are not open for that and it’s impossible to change their mind.

Pretty much nobody I know wants to switch to Signal or any other messaging app. So it’s SMS communication with them because I definitely won’t install WhatsApp.

It’s worse for me in my country, 90% of people use Viber. Which not only has the same lack of privacy with other popular messengers, it’s also ugly, filled with ads and company bots, and it’s obviously targeted to teenagers. It’s so weird to me that people use this app, but I guess most people’s choice is always “whatever my most contacts use”. I’ve been trying to introduce my friends to something better, I would prefer Signal but literally zero of my contacts use it. On Telegram on the other hand, I found 4-5 of my contacts already using it so I started from there, added my family too, and I’m slowly trying to add more friends. Until then, like others said, I’ll use whatever for a casual message, and I’ll just call the person for anything more personal or private.

I have gotten tech minded friends to switch with some success. Getting my wife to switch to privacy friendly communications with me was easy in that I did all of the leg work. I setup her accounts and installed the apps. As far as she was concerned the phone came with XMPP, Matrix and Tuta.

“I don’t have anything to hide”

I prefer to suggest a different mindset - “It’s not that I have nothing to hide. It’s that I have nothing I want anybody to see”