People were willing to pay for WhatsApp. It was exactly that simple, honest, high quality independent paid chat app you are alluding to, back in 2010 or so.

Iirc, it was 1€, and maybe it was even only on iOS.

I remember vaguely getting convinced by a friend, "you just payed [200,300,idk]€ for that new phone, can't pay one euro for this one app?"

> How can we spread this sentiment towards services like email and chat too?

We can't, because those two things are in direct opposition. Piracy was less convenient and offered fewer features that people wanted, so they moved to platforms that were more convenient. The current giants (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp...) are more convenient than their alternatives (generic email, Mastodon, Signal...) and so the pressure is not to move, but in fact to stay.

In general, the pressure is always decentralised->centralised, which is exactly what torrents->Netflix was. Even if we had infinite funds to offer people distributed services for free forever, we would still need to make them more convenient than their current centralised ones - if on top of not being more convenient, we also want to charge them, I see no reason why the average person would ever want to switch.

I think part of the problem is the network effect. Social networks want to maximize the number of users so that anyone can connect to you on Facebook, Twitter, etc. The lowest barrier to entry is free, and that usually means ad supported (and personalized ads for the most revenue).

Maybe there's some space for a freemium model (IIRC one of the questions asked during the Facebook hearing was whether they could add a paid ad-free option) but so far that hasn't happened.

Paid still needs to answer to shareholders