Can you easily communicate in your country (business/private life) without being involuntarily forced to use whatsapp?

Gonna imagine most of the responses will be from North America where WhatsApp use is significantly less.

Being based in Euopre, I'd say probably no; everybody uses WhatsApp. We used it a lot before Facebook bought it as well.

Finland. Wa is rare in business use of any sort. My employer bans it for anything work related as do many others. I've seen maybe one hands fingers worth of businesses with a wa front.

Various associations and clubs do use it for group chats, though.

Also, absolutely not. And you should never trust anyone who says anything like "in Europe" or "Europeans". It's a continent of dozens of countries and cultures many of which have been in war on and off for centuries. There is absolutely nothing that is uniform across all of Europe.
I'm from Europe i literal don't know anyone who uses WhatsApp.
- That's crazy, I can't tell you a single person under 80 years old that don't use it here (Southern Europe), even the most technology agnostic farmer dad knows it, and use it. I thought that was the case in all of Europe too.
- I'm in the UK, whatsapp is ubiquitous and unavoidable as hard as I try. I made a big effort to get people onto Signal but got limited traction and once they killed the sms support those I'd converted ditched it. Viber is dead, no one uses it or threema.
- What about Viber?

For personal - I have never used whatsapp and never will. All my friends either use Signal or SMS. North America here.

For work - I am forced to use whatsapp and hate it, but would not be able to do my job without it, so I'm stuck.

Absolutely, I don't know anyone that really uses WhatsApp.

Yes. I've never used whatsapp.

short answer: no, i can't

European here, I did use WA until Meta (Facebook back then) bought it. Then I typed up a copypasta that said something like:

Because Facebook is buying WhatsApp, I am leaving the platform. You can reach me on these apps: [Link to installer for Signal] [Link to installer for Telegram]

I have since set up a Matrix server that puppets for Telegram so I don't have the actual client installed anywhere.

I deleted Whatsapp a few years ago when I stopped working (would have been more difficult at my work). So now about 90% of my friends etc are on Telegram, and the rest have to phone or e-mail me. I see a few businesses offer some sort of Whatsapp line, but I phone or e-mail them. Just my fridge repair guy has this irritating habit of doing my card payment here and says the receipt will be sent electronically, but obviously it gets sent by Whatsapp and I don't get it. I detest that assumption that "everybody is just on Whatsapp". It's not any sort of official standard like SMS is.

Personally, I really want to see E2EE open standards coming to messengers, like we have e-mail talking to other e-mail servers.

You mean something like RCS?
- RCS is more carrier based messaging and the whole stack is not built with proper E2EE as far as I know. No I'm thinking more like XMPP type open protocol, but endorsed by an international open standards body. I'm fearing that RCS is too tied to carriers just like SMS itself was.
  
  Interesting that we already have a W3C standard for social networking but messaging itself seems to elude us..
I really think it wouldn't be that hard to make a law that messengers have to respect some minimal protocol for interoperability, like RCS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

If EU can force phone makers to have USB ports, it can make messangers respect RCS.
- I'm not sure RCS is yet complete enough. It was really designed with replacement of SMS in mind. It also needs to work independently of any phone number and ensure full E2EE.

Yea, I can just use SMS / Teams / Signal / email depending on the context.

Sms, signal, email, teams, discord, matrix, matters most, and sometimes Facebook messenger. Its always news to me that people outside of the US use WhatsApp.

here in Italy whatsapp is the most used, there are very few people who use telegram just to chat, we usually use it for piracy, or for the bots... also I don't know a single person who use signal, and discord is mainly used by gamers for voice calls

I can telle you in north africa(especially in morocco) it's impossible. Period. You don't even ask if you have whatsapp

From Canada and definitely. Most people here use SMS, but my main communication method is Signal.

In many countries cheap/unlimited SMS was not a thing decades ago, so whatsapp filled that gap. Nowadays things got way better, but people are already used Whatsapp, and in some places companies even offer "unlimited whatsapp" in their plans, so seems unlikely to change.

Also in smaller countries whatsapp and viber were the way to communicate with friends and family in other countries. Not only messages, but audio and video calls. Audio messages are also quite important.

And groups, that's another vector how Viber spread around, parents got to have groups with other parents from their kid's school class.

For my day job I deal with people all over the world and WhatsApp is the only constant among them. If not for that I would've quit this data-harvesting abomination

Impossible. Everybody I know uses WhatsApp.

I‘m not really a loner but I‘m also not willing to do much to be included socially if it requires me to do things that I don‘t believe in.

If your fancy night club requires me to be dressed in a certain way i have no interest of getting in. If your barbecue invitation requires me to install an app that I don‘t feel comfortable with I‘m eating potato salad at home.

I usually ask of people have telegram and I'll use that with them instead if they do.

I'm from Sweden, and the only people that asked me to join a WA group where from various African countries.

Never run in to it otherwise, SMS and Messenger is still king here.

Well, I can. Here you're just forced to use Facebook Messenger instead :)