So to get the obvious out of the way… Becoming an American or a Canadien citizen are both difficult and highly demanding tasks during normal times. We are not in normal times… so I wouldn’t exactly advise it. But:
I don’t believe the communities have migrated out of Reddit yet, but you might have some luck going through Reddit’s r/immigration and r/immigrationcanada first. They both have pretty well-documented wikis and are both reasonably active, can try to register a burner account to ask if you have any questions not answered by anyone else
Cost is probably not an issue since it’s borderline impossible to immigrate to either US or Canada without some type of familial relationship or highly-demanded professional skills. If it is the latter, fairly certain it will be possible to save up to $10k for immigration processing so… And if I do not have familial ties or in-demand skills, it would be close to impossible to immigrate to these two countries in the first place
IMO if I have no affiliations with US/Canada whatsoever, I might try my luck with Europe first… a lot of European countries have a policy of 5 years legal residence -> permanent residence/green card. Canada does have a fast-track points system but it is quite competitive now; US immigration is quite nightmarish, and the country is not very welcoming due to recent developments
Edit: as mentioned below… Eurozone is not a single country. The 5 year thing is just what I observed several (not all) countries in EU adhere to, but yeah please do check the specific rules! Also Switzerland’s immigration policy is somewhat uniquely restrictive by EU standards if it helps.
For my immediate family I’ve made a small self-hosted Matrix server before, although it has its own bundle of issues… if I were to do it again maybe I would choose Signal. But yeah from a pure technical standpoint there are lots of viable insta-messaging alternatives
Sadly you hit the nail on the head regarding the social media “network effect”… I also came from a non-US country that has been dominated by an instachat app that doesn’t respect privacy whatsoever, but good luck convincing a group of ppl to switch to a different software. Sooo… most likely even if you really do get permabanned from Whatsapp, ppl you know in real life might just keep using Whatsapp without you anyway
But anyways, if you don’t mind giving a bit of a white lie… the excuse you gave (“permabanned from Whatsapp”) actually doesn’t sound to bad to me IMO