There's a shitload wrong with Signal from an architecture and engineering perspective but it seems very silly to ban it unless they're planning to ban all encrypted telecommunications and prevent consumer/residential endpoints from cross-communicating with each other. Otherwise what's the point? The cat's been out of the bag on cryptography no state can crack until fairly far into the future, for decades now, so I'm not sure what the sudden urgency is all about...
To ban cryptography in practice you basically have to ban math
Had a math prof once that worked in post quantum crypto who talked about getting stopped at airports because intelligence was worried about him selling stuff. Wish he was that based. Dude was absolutely brilliant though, would just sort of work problems out from scratch every time for his upper level algebra courses even
I use Signal, and it definitely seems like the most privacy-friendly messaging app, but I'm not a fan of MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency its founder started, and I really don't like that Signal supports MobileCoin for in-app payments. I feel a little conflicted, because I don't know of a better alternative out there.
Matrix/Element isn't into crypto, but it leaks metadata and surveillance basically relies mainly on metadata anyway. Still, it's my favorite alternative despite the metadata thing because it's not sus and you don't need to give your phone number for it
Session is into crypto, but doesn't require a phone number and maybe doesn't leak metadata
Briar is limited
Signal has the best user experience out of all of them
