Email, docs, music, maps etc have reasonable alternatives and you don’t depend on others to switch (a gmail user will receive my email from tuta). But with WhatsApp either you conceal and use it or you just don’t talk to people (tried convincing them to switch to signal and it simply doesn’t happen)
How do you deal with it?
Delta Chat
You can choose the relays yourself as its decentralised:
https://chatmail.at/relays
Im hearing more and more about Deltachat. Where is it based?
eh, it runs on e-mail infrastructure; also, it does a little bit more than messaging.
You can use your usual e-mail ID, and message anybody else’s e-mail ID, but securely only if they also use Delta Chat. To work around the big servers seeing your social graph, they recommend using randomly-generated IDs on always-encrypted tuned e-mail servers that they call “chat mail” servers.
Either way, you also get user-to-user web apps called WebXDC. This is something even some XMPP clients have added nowadays.