I get your point, but moving people to Signal has been an accomplishment on its own, you get to say "we should move to this new private app" only so many times, before your friends and family grab their torches.

The good thing is that matrix can be bridged to Signal[1], to allow for a smoother transition period.

This is also true with Whatsapp[2], but against their terms of service, so you risk getting banned, and built on reverse-engineering, plus you need an android VM of some sort.

I've been personally moving my family to Signal, since that provides the best UX and easier transition from Whatsapp. Once I'm comfortable enough with it, we'll likely transition to matrix.

What Matrix is missing is in my view:

- Client with simple UI, polished UX, and not just a smoking pot of features: FluffyChat[3] is mostly there.

- Server of which I can guarantee the uptime. Dendrite should lower the resource usage for a ~5-100 accounts server, and decentralised identities[4] would allow falling back to another server (such as a friend's).

We're mostly there, so I'm starting to prepare the switch, starting with my more technical friends, by setting a bridge up. Hopefully we can finally break that dependency on phone numbers (ideally, domain names as well with [4]) and move on to bey-based IDs.

[1] https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-signal

[1] Older bridge, unmaintained: https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-signal

[2]https://matrix.org/docs/guides/whatsapp-bridging-mautrix-wha...

[3] https://web.fluffychat.im/en/

[4] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/neilalexander/...

If you want people to be privacy minded this is what you have to prepare them for, though. Signal could get bought out by a privacy-hostile company next year, or they could go out of business.

Or get a visit from the NSA.

Well if you just remove the app and let them know where they can find you. They basically have no choice.

Telegram is not better than WhatsApp in the very important aspect that it is not end-to-end encrypted. You can balance up the risks of facebook inserting malicious code into their client against the risks of your data being accessable at rest on Telegram's servers, but it's not at all clear Telegram is in a better spot there.

e2e encryption is mostly moot considering neither the client-application nor -device are really trustworthy.

then there is the problem with push-notifications passing throu either google or apple as well as device-backups which both hand over your metadata and probably message content.

imo telegram is in a better spot simply because it is not affilliated with the facebook/google ecosystem but in the end it does not make much of a difference due to aforementioned systematic deficiencies.

imo good reasons to cash in on the platform compatibility and convenience of telegrams cloud-messaging architecture.