I’ve been inspecting this topic quite a lot and I’m a little confused now. So, we have reasons not to use Signal, reasons not to use Matrix, there were also some claims about Session being a fraught. Briar is mostly activists related (not very suitable for daily use), XMPP lacks good clients and suffers from fragmentation of protocol implementation, SimpleX is too feature-incomplete (no UnifiedPush support, big battery drain on Android, very decent desktop client without any message sync). I can’t say a lot about Threema or Wire, as I’m not very familiar with them.
So, my question is — is there any good private messenger at all? What do you think is the most acceptable option?
It’s not too difficult to establish a Signal account from a burner number from a prepaid sim card. I currently have a Signal account tied to a sim not in my name. Getting a burner with cash is an option. Or, if you’re lucky enough to live near a payphone and can gain access to the number, you can activate a signal with a phone call.
There is no reason to do any of that. No one forced signal to use phone numbers as their primary identifier, and plenty of privacy oriented chat programs don’t require that.