Has Signal usage collapsed? It seems so.

For daily communications I use either iMessage or WhatsApp. I have other options installed in my phone, like the p2p Keet app and the totally off-grid Meshtastic app, but those are barely used. 

Now that WhatsApp is going to show adverts I guess I might see some friends hate it and switch to Signal like they did last time WhatsApp was in the news in a negative way. 

The problem I guess is that too many people use WA daily and don't care about meta data leaking (loss of privacy) and don't care about seeing adverts either. 

They will keep on using WhatsApp anyways. 😥 

To test if anyone who installed Signal is ever opening it, I posted a "status" (yes, Signal has those too).

This is a screenshot from my "add story" screen in Signal. The point is to show "216 kijkers (viewers)"

As you can see here, I have 216 'viewers' on Signal. That's only 10% of the total amount of contacts I have on WA. 

So, after almost 24 hours and potentially 214 viewers, I got exactly one viewer. 

My current analysis is that Signal is almost dead. 

Hopefully this will change permanently after ads are shown too often in WA. We will see. 

TIL Perplexity can also find cars based on license plates

I strolled past an interesting looking van today. Me and my buddy Peter wondered if we could find what brand, model and year the car would be from. 

My guess would be a Hanemag or Unimog car from the '80. Kentekencheck.nl came up blank. 

But Lo And Behold. Perplexity was able to identity the car as a recent Russian car made by Uaz. 

That is one more use case were I won't be needing special websites or Kagi or another search engine for.