About 6 years ago I took the hard decision to leave WhatsApp as I begun my privacy journey, it was a hard decision as they have a huge exit barrier (e.g. not having an easy way to take your conversations with you, even if you can't import it somewhere else) and also very strong network effect.

It has been an interesting experience as people don't seem to understand or accept the fact I'm not a WhatsApp user, they ask me to abandon my decision and go back. I believe they are doing it because it's a lot more convenient to have all their contacts and conversations in a single app, and people doesn't seem concerned about their privacy (AFAIK it was never proven WhatsApp has backdoors, their walled garden won't allow us to audit).

Recently in Joe Rogan's interview with Mark Zuckeberg, and they talked about encryption at the very end of the episode, he still claims they share a lot of technology with Signal (no shit Sherlock, you literally took the code into your walled garden) and the only way for someone to access your conversations is if they gain access to the device itself (govts using pegasus with various zero day exploits).

I'm still trying to find the best option without shitcoiners behind it, I did find this spreadsheet with many messaging apps and various criteria, but haven't decided on something I like more than Signal. Did you?

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EDIT: As a founder I admire that everybody seem to love WhatsApp UX and feature set, and on top of that they have the exit barrier and the network effect. I wonder what will take for people to change to something else.