so you like to run around and force all your contacts onto a new better messenger du jour? Messaging is by definition a social activity, so unless you sever most connections and just message yourself, you do end up using whatsapp, telegram, shit some of my family still uses skype! so all this well-meaning advice "just use..." is ridiculous in practice.
This fragmentation of the communication space is the problem that the new EU regulation for messenger interoperability tries to attack. I agree with this idea and also with the idea to make it mandatory only for platforms above a certain size.
To me it makes sense. We had centuries where people could send a letter from one country to another country, both with their own postal services. Why can't we send a message from iMessage to Whatsapp without installing another company's spyware?
However, I do not agree at all with the EU's plans for Chat Control.
Pondering why your refactoring of "Network Effects" has a lot of truth;
The supposed property that the attractive influence of a network is
proportional to its size, rather like gravitational agglomeration,
turns out to be largely false in practice.
My observation is that people don't join a network because "all their
friends" are on it. That's a myth. But they do find it hard to leave
because one or two highly weighted friends (family, parents living
abroad etc) are on it.
You could probably say "network effects is just marketing" too. I
think the idea of "organic growth" is also largely a myth. Massive
amounts of marketing hype and billion dollar influence operations herd
the masses, and also default settings and bundling. It's hard to avoid
Google, Facebook or Twitter when your phone and browser come
pre-configured with them.