Saving you the bother, Signal is good, but requires phone number and the desktop client sucks, while the generally recommended federated FOSS things are all over-engineered and morally obsolete. One can’t rework XMPP into a modern standard, and it’s complex. Actually Signal’s authors have published a couple of articles explaining their choices in making it.
I don’t want WhatsApp & I avoid the 'stores, so it’s F-Droid options for me…
Any opinions on Jami?
I’m also seeing XMPP mentioned in the comments, so I might look at that a bit more…
Saving you the bother, Signal is good, but requires phone number and the desktop client sucks, while the generally recommended federated FOSS things are all over-engineered and morally obsolete. One can’t rework XMPP into a modern standard, and it’s complex. Actually Signal’s authors have published a couple of articles explaining their choices in making it.
There are ways around that
I found SimpleX Chat to be a fairly decent alternative without phone numbers.