Streaming platforms and Social Medias change our way of thinking more than ever before. Now it's easier to suggest what to think, buy, or use. A few weeks ago I read about the Netflix Effect. After The Queen's Gambit was released on October 23, 2020 demand for chess-related services and assets increased extremely in the world.
The same process has been initiated on the 7th of January by Elon Musk's tweet. He suggested using Signal instead of WhatsApp for private communication.
What happened after this message can be called the 'Elon Musk Effect'. The Signal app is down since yesterday. Messages were received and delivered with a noticeable delay.
Although today it seems more stable, I am surprised it takes so long to scale the app in a cloud environment. Let's wait for the official Postmortem for more technical details.
Also, the tweet increased my Google Search statistics. I am already using Signal for several years and managed to write several posts about it. The most searched one right now describes how to back up and decrypt Signal data. So it is really nice that people not only go for privacy but do research about backups at an early stage. Additionally, I will research later how to spin up the Signal server on VPS to run it on decentralized from the official servers for experimenting.
So thanks Elon. I think it's better to go for privacy late than never.