Give Telegram or Matrix a try. They are both miles ahead of Signal and their teams on both sides actually seem to care about openness and usability.
Signal actively discourages third-party clients and doesn't accept community contributions in most cases(not that you'd actually want to, because their codebases are trash.) We can do better.
Matrix with bridges and your own server is quite a nice experience. Have a look at beeper: https://www.beeper.com/
I get why Signal's approach can be unpopular, but I don't understand the fascination with Telegram to be honest. Sure, the Android app is nice and fluid, but if I needed to use an app that is not e2e encrypted, I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger. Both have much wider adoption than Telegram.
Facebook Messenger is tied to Facebook. Which is necessarily tied to a real name identity. Ditto for SMS. Telegram on the other hand is only minimally connected to a phone number (only need to be used once), with no real name requirements. It offers sufficient anonymity while allowing public gatherings. And of course, Facebook is much more likely to cooperate with law enforcement & national security apparatus in any given country compared to Telegram.
Telegram now has 550 million users according to the article. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion users - more twice as many, but I won't call that a "much wider adoption".
I’ve been having an issue with E2E encryption in a Room on a self-hosted homeserver with ~10 users. It has to do with a user having multiple devices, I think. There’s an ongoing issue on GitHub [0]. It’s been the only downside to Element for us, so far. Other than that I’m happy with Matrix in general. Kind of a pain trying to troubleshoot decryption keys cross-country with my mom.
I've found that issue can be solved by opening the same chat on your multiple devices at the same time, and it will send the E2E keys across.
I'm thinking this may be a messaging issue rather than a technical bug in some cases - `Unable to decrypt: The sender's device has not sent us the keys for this message` isn't very helpful.
I think while this isn't ideal, it's important to note (for those following along) that neither Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp support end-to-end encryption across desktop and mobile, history syncing to new devices, and a self hosted OSS server with multiple client apps.
Ability to send pictures without lossy compression, for one. Scheduled messages, group chats that preserve history (allowing one to rotate a phone number without losing access to history). Video calls that allow one to sync the video orientation. UX that is just better designed for the lay person (at least as far as my rudimentary a/b testing goes).
For now Durov has kept his word for 7 years which is a whole lot longer than most. He was also clear from the start that he would, if necessary, find a non intrusive way to fund it and I feel he might be onto it.
