Lawn_and_disorder [he/him]

Reding the link now " The reason the US government hasn’t tried to block or hinder Signal, is because it’s satisfied with the amount of information Signal can provide to it." Well the metadata of who is contacting who can be acquired by other means. CIA also like to have secure tools. Just like you can argue the CIA connection in the TOR case . It doesn’t mean backdoors and so on.

Centralisation argument sure, but that issue will always be there at some level, even for matrix.

Phonenumber discovarability argument is no longer correct as it is possible to use signal and not disclosing it to contacts, but yes still to signal.

I have a signal account with a fake number so that is an option as well, if even more work than matrix process.

There is also desktop clients for both.

Use signal and matrix. Telegram is as people pointed out usually unencrypted. Also unverifieble in its code . Signal is easy uses but phonenumbers ( you can register a fake one however) but always EE2E. Matrix does not require a number at all. But definatly is a bit harder to get started with and are therefore harder to get your contact to use it.

One of the first steps I did was removing the Facebook app and replacing it with a Foss version still maintaining the account. Not until a lot later I deleted it. People do change. Go ahead, add some share buttons.

SMS codes as mentioned and cellular data makes something with Sim card or e-sim a necessity. This can be mitigated by using a portable hotspot or cellular router/modem. Had a teltonika router that autoforwards the SMS as email.

Next best thing to GOS would be Calyx OS. Seems only pixels are getting full updates unfortunataly… https://calyxos.org/install/ The hardware on the pixels security wise is unfortunately hard to beat. Get a used one?

E/OS seems like a good choice if you don’t want to use a pixel.