At this point, it isn't about privacy vs. convenience, it's about privacy vs. being able to have a social life. People aren't going to install a more privacy-supportive messenger just for you, they'll gradually let you drop out of their lives just like you would with a friend that you can only reach by driving to their farm 6 hours away.

People had social lives before facebook existed... it largely consisted of going places and seeing people regularly. This still works, believe it or not.

Replace convenience with whatever benefit you see most pertinent. That is your trade-off. For me, convenience is the most frequent benefit.

It's definitely tough, but a big perk of WhatsApp is also the data-calls (instead of paying for long-distance). Maybe next time I visit I can try to help convince them to check out something new, but I also ended up dragging a couple of social groups onto WhatsApp to organize events, chat, etc just by viture of it being what most people use. Especially over in Europe, it's very heavily used and not easy to replace, as it's sometimes the de-facto platform for communication.

But it's definitely a trade-off, so I at least kind of have a choice.