As someone who has been defending Telegram against certain claims here from time to time this is still a sad day for me.

I'd appreciate however if everyone who has been saying ugly things about the alternatives would take a step back now and consider if there is more to security than E2E-encryption.

E2E-encryption is a seriously nice and useful property of a messaging system, but in the long run it is only one of many important details, and while E2E-encryption is always a good thing for end users as far as I can see other useful properties are often directly at odds with each other:

- incentives and funding. Free to give everyone the ability to use it or paid to align incentives?

- anonymity or verified identies? Both have significant advantages.

- repudiation or non repudiation? Depends on if you agreed on a contract or discussed something that the new regime doesn't approve of.

- backups? or ephemeral? Again, depends on if you are sharing family photos in a group or or sharing something that should stay between you and the recipient

Edit to add: As for solutions I think healthy competition is one of the best ways to ensure every messaging system tries to be tje best they can be.