Ontimp

No reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good though. As you said, pretty much anything is better than WhatsApp

Depends. Signal is the strongest competitor within that niche, but overall both will only grow if they capture marker share from WhatsApp; which is perfectly feasible as they are in principle perfectly viable substitute products and it’s mostly the monopolistic pressures of WhatsApp’s preexisting user base. In my personal experiences, Signal, Threema, Matrix, etc. see use within relatively closed bubbles (i.e. I moved my family over to signal, or a work project team uses Element for Matrix, etc.). But more and more people you run into in Germany already have a second messenger that is not owned by Meta in their phone and I would hence expect that WhatsApp’s market share will drop over the next few years. Signal imo has the lead here as it works with phone numbers too, so you don’t need to know someone else’s handle

Foe many of the federated self hosted ones you can just use the public instances; it’s about as freaky as using Lemmy lol

Yes but those things are being worked on including meta data encryption.

Also, strictly speaking you can migrate accounts, it’s just a little cumbersome and needs either some manual effort or separate tooling. I agree though that it should be considerably easier.

Any number of Matrix-based messengers fulfill most of those criteria; meta data reduction could be better but we’re getting there.

Also Signal is very decent alternative if you want a WhatsApp-like UX from a trustworthy source.

This reporting seems quite one-sided.