In my opinion, the coolest project currently on IPFS is Standard Template Construct. Just no video streaming.

You must live in a huge neighbourhood. Your points are valid, though you can now choose to keep chats archived even when receiving a message. Settings > Chats > Keep chats archived.

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It’s not a particularly privacy-focused app, but there are much worse options. In some countries, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger are extremely popular. Teenagers in many places primarily use Snapchat. At least the message content on WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. I’m pretty happy everyone I know uses it. I’d rather have everyone using Signal, but it’s definitely better than many other chat apps.

WhatsApp seems very conservative with adding new features. I generally feel the features they do decide to add are all pretty useful. Telegram on the other hand doesn’t ever seem to slow down with the new features. Many of them seem great, but just as many I would never use. I’m still wondering why Telegram won’t introduce end-to-end encryption as a default.