I used to think that, until I realised it's impossible (well difficult, and not officially supported) to export your messages from WhatsApp. That's pretty bullshit.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-save-your-chat...:

“Depending on your settings, you can also periodically back up your WhatsApp chats to Google Drive”

“You can use the export chat feature to export a copy of the chat history from an individual or group chat.”

I haven’t checked the full backup, but exports of individual chats are easily readable (zip with a .txt of all texts in the chat and individual images, IIRC)

The full backup is unfortunately not accessible! I can’t think why they’ve done this, but it’s incredibly user hostile!

The individual exports work fine, but it’s very tedious to go through every conversation individually.

If you have an Android phone, you can extract the SQLite DB that contains all your WhatsApp messages. When I switched from Android to iOS I backed up my DB and still use it when I need to read an old conversation.

WhatsApp is very much a social network

Then SMS is too, right?

SMS is communication protocol; you can only send text messages or reply to text messages, nothing beyond that. No profiles, status updates, friends etc.

SMS cannot do group chats in any meaningful way.

So no, at least SMS is not a social network.

I don't like WhatsApp anymore but it was in its time my favourite social network. I had all my important groups there, used it exclusively to communicate with close friends and family.

It was the place were most images were shared and discussions were held and so on.

No. Hard to do group threads. Not encrypted end to end (but WhatsApp is owned by FB so moot point).

Even iMessage seems very much like a 1-1 messaging system.

They did try and tie into FB more in India with disastrous results, and had to backtrack hard