A truly ethical replacement would not need a phone number

Be careful with that ol' Chestnut. Circumstances may dictate perfection, where less than such may be catastrophic.

No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal's key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.

One of WhatsApp's founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.

Molly is great.

That's a risk, and a reason I'd like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person's tech skills and comfort level improved.

Signal's status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.

In that case it wouldn't be "good enough". But I don't think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.

You can use Molly from F-Droid. They even have a full FOSS version that you can set up a self hosted notification socket for, to avoid Google Firebase.

I agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there's still one problem.

Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc)
This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not "perfect" it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

It is though. I currently use Signal installed through F-Droid. You just need to add a separate repository.

And would have FOSS implementations of reference server & client + an openly specified protocol.

Like Matrix.

I don't know, the GrapheneOS folks say that F-Droid is a potential security catastrophe.

You can find Molly from Accrescent (and apparently also from F-Droid if you must use that), which is not so much a security catastrophe.

That blog post was my reason to double down on Matrix.

signal requires a phone number and won't even allow you to send sms to those that aren't on signal.

its better, but still not great.

telegram much better

How about Delta Chat? At least as secure as Signal, open source, and decentralized.

Anyone using Session? I finally got most of my friends and family on Signal so I'm not gonna switch but I just heard about it, seems pretty good.

I've been using Signal for years and my database was getting really bloated with media, attachments, etc but I didn't want to delete it all. I used this and it's incredible:

GitHub - bepaald/signalbackup-tools: Tool to work with Signal Backup files.

Tool to work with Signal Backup files. Contribute to bepaald/signalbackup-tools development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

Just make a backup from within signal, copy that backup file to your PC, then run this tool. The commands I used make an HTML webpage that looks just like the signal messenger, along with a way of searching your messages. You can choose different commands to export however you like.

I used:

signalbackup-tools [input] [passphrase] --exporthtml [directory] --split --searchpage --originalfilenames

So while this doesn't help you move off your current messenger, you don't have to worry that your data/messages will be lost in Signal.

Basically Signal but without the weakness of a phone number & runs on a Tor-like network. It's still a work-in-progress thing but you CAN use it to send messages