i've just seen a comment in a post, in this very community, saying people trust signal because of missinformation (from what i could undertand).
if this is true, then i have a few questions:
-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.
-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?
-what this means for other apps in general?
I'm put off by the centralized server. I'd want to self host without having to build a special client, something like nextcloud. That the company chose to prevent that gives me a bad impression. So I haven't been using it so far.
I've played with GNU Jami a little but it was flaky when I tried it last year. Maybe it's better now.
You can't have it both ways. It's hard enough to get people to switch to signal, or least also use it next to other messengers. Now imagine they'd have to connect to multiple servers to talk to multiple people. Possibly everyone connection details. Even if that's done in the background, you have to somehow get the connection registered once, discovered if you will.
Anything and everything you send through their server is end-to-end encrypted. Some people hate on the phone number being required to create an account, but it's also the reason it works at all: anyone in your contacts who also has signal you can talk to. Phone numbers are an international standard. If course this also has downsides...
Finally what you're asking for exists. NextCloud has "talk". Which is essentially a messenger app, it's built in. Go use it. I have a NextCloud instance and I don't use it either. What's the point of having an app I can only use to talk with people so close to me that they're in my NextCloud with an account already?
Of course I can. Jitsi Meet lets you do it both ways. I don't know if Nextcloud has an official hosted server but they could if they wanted. I use it self-hosted and it works, the Talk app is just not very good. Jami uses a DHT instead of a centralized server which is another approach, though it might be part of its flakiness. Linphone (a regular VOIP client, not a secure chat thing) is set up by default to point to Linphone's own SIP servers but you can change that in Settings. No reason Signal can't do similar. Heck, even Lemmy works that way (you choose your server).
Signal is simply being evil and your defending them is unconvincing. I could opt to self-host Signal and build a special client for my users, at the cost of hassle for everyone but no serious technical drawbacks. Signal chooses to create that hassle because they want to funnel users through their servers, not incidentally collecting metadata about ALL the user conversations.
There's actually a configurable Signal client called Amanda or something like that, though I haven't tried it. Someone here mentioned it last time this came up.
Also, Signal's own client isn't on F-droid, which raises more potential questions. I haven't cared enough to look into it.
Added: oh re Nextcloud, I see what you mean, account creation is an obstacle, though that could be handled like Hipchat used to. You could generate a randomized URL to invite someone to your private chat without their needing an account. Nextcloud has that too, though just for file access, not for chat for some reason. Come to think of it, Signal could also work that way: it shouldn't need accounts at all.
When I've invited people to my Nextcloud I've just enrolled the account for them myself and told them "please log in with username X password Y".