XMPP or Matrix. I’m on Matrix only because I have my family there and I was there before I knew of XMPP and at this point I can’t turn that boat.

Signal was/is (idk if they still are) into crypto, they don’t let you run your own server or client, and they have a proprietary shim in place to combat spam (or so they say, it can’t be audited because it’s proprietary).

I was all in on Signal until the above.

Firefox is the only choice for me at this point.

My opion is I won’t go near it. Matrix via Elementor it’s many other clients is for me and my family.

I don’t agree with the Lemmy dev and won’t read his stuff, but I also stopped using Signal years ago. First they won’t allow third party appa or self hosted servers, then they got into Crypto and were building a wallet and currency, which is their right, then they announced a proprietary closed source part of their application that can’t be auditted in the name of fighting spam. Yes there’s a blog post out there about it that they themselves posted and no I can’t look it up atm. I’m personally tired of sacrificing privacy for the name of security so I left.

I moved to Matrix and Element. I have my entire family on it, all nontech folks except me, and none of them have any issues. We use it for text and video constantly and have for years. It’s gotten very intuitive.

To each their own, but Signal isn’t the bastion of free open source privacy anymore imo.