There is a massive barrier to switching.

In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch.

Good luck with that.

> In order to switch, you also need to convince your acquaintances to switch.

Rather: you have to to convince yourself to be willing to make it a little bit harder, if necessary, for these acquaintances to contact you. :-)

There is no switching involved, you can have two apps installed at the same time. It's not a social network where posting to one means the people posting on the other won't see your stuff.

You're always going to send the message on the app with 100% coverage.

I'm not switching apps to send the same message to 50% of people and then again to 100% resulting in some switchers getting it twice.

And lets be honest, people dont walk around recommending chat apps to each other. It hasn't been 2010 for at least five years.

You are ignoring chat groups here.

When I did it, because my phone supports multiple apps being installed at the same time, I was able to do it gradually. Most people I know do have a second option to reach them so it wasn't a problem at all.

This needs a regulatory involvement (for federation)

That already happened in EU with trying to force leading communications platforms to integrate with at least one competitor. I remember an initiative to make WhatsApp integrate with (wait for it..) Skype.

I'm not sure how or why it fizzled out.