keybase.io has been great, although it's not without its risks either since it was acquired by Zoom. It's still up and seemingly maintained but AFAIK there's no new feature work.

I've heard WhatsApp recommended from people I trust, but I have never personally used it so can't speak from experience.

The legal team at the company I work for are suggesting to remove keybase and treat it as compromised as there is no way of knowing of keys and other data has not been shared with the Chinese government. No proof at all of course, just the world we live in I guess :)

A lot of people moved to Signal because of WhatsApps changes so that advice can thought of as misleading at best.

Your suggested alternatives are owned by Zoom and Facebook. I'll stick with Signal.

As a Facebook owned app, I don't trust WhatsApp.

All of them being tied to a phone number is bad form.

> keybase.io has been great

> Crypto thing they attempted

well...

matrix/element.

XMPP with OMEMO e2ee. Fallback to jitsi meet for video calling, although several xmpp clients support video calling to each other.

Jitsi Meet is pretty good for video, and relatively easy to self-host, though you'll need some decent resources for it. The docker-jitsi-meet project[0] can get you started quickly

Signal's "source available" infra can be self-hosted but it's huge effort and relies on a bunch of cloud-specific services which need to be replaced with self-hostslable alternatives. It's also extremely poorly documented and the code quality is fairly mediocre. I wouldn't recommend trying to host Signal infra yourself; it can be done; I've done it at work and it took some months of effort, and maintaining it is a nightmare (or was, then at least) because they'd only push one huge update to GitHub quarterly or less often.

[0]https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet