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It depends where you live. Whatsapp is the default way of communicating in a lot of countries, way more popular than text messages. You might be able to get individuals to contact you another way, but if the group chat is in WhatsApp, you’re probably not going to persuade the group to change.
Thanks but that only leaves me with more questions. Why is it that way in so many countries? Why don't they use alternatives? Do they like being slaves to Meta, having their entire lives being monitored by the company?
It wasn’t always a Meta product. Also, by the time everyone started finding out how evil Facebook was, Whatsapp was too entrenched for people to easily switch to something else, not when all their friends and family members were using it.
In a lot of places, SMS is/was more expensive (and Whatsapp seen as affordable/available) around the time Whatsapp took off. If you’re from somewhere like a relatively small EU country where you’re more likely to want to message people from other countries, there’s also the issue of international rates. So SMS had more disadvantages in some places and wasn’t necessarily as widely adopted as in the US. And some places didn’t have quite the same progression from dumb phone texting to smartphone texting that the US had, either because of costs or lacking infrastructure. More people skipped the widespread dumb phone texting phase, and internet access was expanding. So there was no reason not to use a cheaper internet-based service from a provider people didn’t think was evil at the time.