Problem is, I already moved my friends and family to Signal and removed Whatsapp from my phone. It was an uphill battle that I don't want to fight again. What do I do, now? As much as there's a lot of questionable stuff on Signal, that's nothing compared to whatsapp. Do you suggest a Signal alternative that is significantly better?

I don't have an answer which is likely to satisfy you. I'm still a grumpy old IRC user. I communicate with non-technical friends and family via email, SMS, and Jitsi Meet. I allowed myself to be persuaded to try Matrix earlier this year and so far I've regret it.

goodpoint's answer is probably the best longer term answer: someone needs to fork Signal and manage it properly. But it's not as simple as just rebranding the software, it needs lots of difficult technical work to fix its many problems.

>try Matrix earlier this year and so far I've regret it

Why is that?

Very bloated and unreliable.

Have you tried XMPP? The server and client implentations are both a lot more resource efficient.

I have tried XMPP. It's not much better, but has different problems.

Support a new, well managed fork of Signal

This. It was hard enough to migrate people from Whatsapp ( as in, for all my privacy gripes, it is hard to argue that it just works very well in most instances ).

It is not like most of my social groups are me-centric, which forces me to pick battles carefully. Now that I moved people to signal, I need to do what I can to try moving signal to my ideal space ( no phone requirement being one of them, 3rd party clients and so on ).

Sounds like sunk cost. What are your chances to influence Signal leadership in any way? A better idea would be to use internet standands for messaging to avoid vendor lock-in.

I agree in general, but can you offer a current project that is reasonably secure, relatively easy to install and use and built on actual standards?

That list is still short. I would love to be able to return to pidgin days, where all I had to connect my various accounts >.>

I do not know if the issue is that some the features are just incompatible with standards?

Sadly, the biggest problem is inertia.

https://snikket.org/ could be the thing you're looking for.

Thank you. I will test it out. It actually may hit the spot.

What's the alternative? My mom onboarded my entire extended family to Signal, and she's not technical. I'm not sure of anything else, outside of Meta-owned WhatsApp, with that kind of simplicity.

Telegram is super easy, but there's the whole "not e2ee by default" thing that some people care about.

Threema is liked for security. I haven't used it, but my mother's tennis group is using it, and they're all 65+.

I personally do not think this is user hostile because users have an interest in being able to distinguish between official and unofficial distribution of software, in particular in a security relevant case like this.

I used this snap package thinking it was an official one, if I had known that it isn't I wouldn't have installed it.