Yeah, social stuff like that is an issue. I currently use Telegram to keep in touch with some friends; the big upshot of Telegram is that after registering, you can use web.telegram.org or the desktop app without having your smartphone (or in my case, emulator) powered on. There's no E2E encryption, but that's fine. WhatsApp, Signal, and most other solutions really
are tied to the smartphone: web.whatsapp.com will route messages through your phone; it's really annoying; I wish they would just E2E directly from your laptop, but I guess that's too obscure of a "market" to cater too.
You can still use it with the Android Emulator though; there's a bunch of solutions for this but I just use the Android Studio one. It works, but you need to keep the emulator running and isn't especially convenient.
I feel like tying a lot of things to these proprietary platforms that are impossible to integrate with independently is essentially redoing the mistakes of the 90s and 00s that we had with Microsoft where you more or less had to have Microsoft Office or you'd have a hard time reading/editing those .doc files sent to you (eventually OpenOffice.org was kind-a okay at it, but still far from perfect).
I don't even mind non-free software as a matter of principle, I just want the freedom to use an "alternative" system like my Linux desktop or maybe some eclectic device like PinePhone or those modern PDA things or whatnot to participate in basic stuff, instead of being forced to shell out money to one of those huge tech giants with a bazillion dollars to purchase thingies I don't even like.