For anonymous proxy (which is what you seem to mean instead of VPN) I just keep using Tor for almost everything. Sure, some services do block it - more than your usual commercial offering. But TBF that mostly saves me time from tying to deal with them.

Honestly it was mostly a Discord competitor if anything. One with FOSS clients for desktop and Android.

The private chat is baseline implementation just to tick a box rather than anything practically useful.

I’m not convinced by Session’s decision to remove forward secrecy. I don’t care if it’s malice or incompetence, they shouldn’t be in business of encrypted messaging either way.

And their lack of transparency on their share of underlying network and the associated costs for new entrants doesn’t make them smell like a cryptoscam any less.

My personal advice is avoid. You’ll be far better off with simplex, or xmpp+omemo for something not paired with phone number.

EU is not doing it yet, however there is strong push from interested parties within and outside of the EC:

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content

Including illegal use of targeted advertising / misinformation campaign:

https://eupolicy.social/@ilumium/111226868912928077

Look at https://simplex.im/ then. It’s work in progress but the design is good.

But I’m glad to have a better Signal client too.