I'm facing the same problems. All the people in my (real life) social circle are using WhatsApp. All of my friends are calling me crazy that I don't have Instagram, so talking about alternative messaging apps is probably not going to work. I think this is true for most people in the western culture. I value my privacy, but the struggle is to big for me.
Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a solution for this problem. That you can choose your messaging apps and that they can interfere with each other, like email clients.
There already are IM protocols. The problem is that companies prefer to create walled gardens. Even if a protocol were to take off, what usually happens is that one company leverages the protocol to gain traction, spends enough resources to build a really great user experience, and once they’ve amassed a big enough percentage of users, they toss the protocol and use something proprietary. You’d need the protocol to have at least two popular clients so that the user base is split between them. That might prevent one from dropping support for the protocol.
Thanks for your comment. I quickly searched for the IM protocols and there are plenty of open-source projects with promising functionalities.
I think that the mindset of the majority of the people is the source of this problem. Most of the people I speak to don't care about their privacy. They say that they have nothing to hide and that's a valid statement. The problem is that we don't get to choose. If someone wants to share all of their personal information it's their choice, but to not share your personal information seems almost impossible. Social standards expect that you have WhatsApp and LinkedIn and such.
I'm really shocked that people these days don't even ask for phone numbers. They ask for Instagram. I don't have it and do feel like I'm "missing out" on updates from friends. But then it reminds me how much I hated Facebook before I quit. These days my WhatsApp bio says "text me on Telegram" and usually my WhatsApp is not running on the background.
Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a solution for this problem. That you can choose your messaging apps and that they can interfere with each other, like email clients.