SimpleX Chat – Many suggested this and I will explicitly recommend against it due to the founder's positions on various topics. This includes being anti-vaxx, believing COVID-19 was a hoax, trans- and homophobia, climate denial; In the SimpleX Groupchat he's also been seen basically bootlicking trump a couple times, but I've lost receipts to that.

I did not know this. I've seen people recommend SimpleX on lemmy too, but probably they didn't know.

cheap and easy? I tried running it myself and ran into several hurdles, and gave up. How did you host it? VPS? Docker? Bare-metal?

why does matrix require you self hosting? There’s a bunch of free open-signup servers available

I've been using Keet for a couple of months now, really like it. Still in beta, but you can ask questions to the devs in the open chat rooms and they actually give you sound answers

Also there's Jami which looks good, but haven't tested it

Because Matrix isn't exactly private since it's meant to be a Discord clone and I share piracy among my friends and family, or for the sexy times with my friends, I need something that at least has self-destructing messages and chats where messages dissapear after some time.

I could trust it if I could self-host, but I lack the hardware (disk space, mostly) and the availability (I can't leave my pc on all the time [also I live in México, the internet is terrible and I tend to hog it if I'm downloading something]), so I'd have to trust some random yahoo with my stuff but it wouldn't have what I'm looking for anyway.

Which one of those is closer to what Telegram brings to the table?
Mostly pretty stuff like gifs/mp4/webm with alpha, stickers, animated stickers and handling things like webp/webm, self-destructing multimedia, chats that dissapear after X time, sending huge files, the option to send something as a file if it can't be played internally, a desktop version that I can use simultaneusly... maybe groups and channels too, adding people by alias instead of phone number (maybe qr, but not a huge link like the one SimpleX uses).

You know, things that could help me to bring my "friends" and family on board or at least to give it a try.

Here's Matrix CEOs answer to this article: https://lobste.rs/c/jekh0n -- according to him the article is absurd amounts of FUD

Fuck... Is there an alternative?
Can't use telegram cus banned, won't use signal because usa and for a while they got very buddy-buddy with the zucc, matrix requires me hosting and it isn't exactly private... So what's left?

no mention of tox chat, eh? Open source, p2p private chat, what's not to like?

Here's Matrix CEOs answer to this article: https://lobste.rs/c/jekh0n -- according to him the article is absurd amounts of FUD

Cooked al dente?

Is that it? We stop using better programs because we disagree with the creator's views?

What a disgusting, childish world some of these people live in.

"I was going to buy that house, but the owner's views made me reconsider. I decided to go with something worse."

Is anyone else using Delta chat as an alternative? I can’t fault their idea of basing their chat app on the well established email system.

Because Matrix isn't exactly private since it's meant to be a Discord clone and I share piracy among my friends and family, or for the sexy times with my friends, I need something that at least has self-destructing messages and chats where messages dissapear after some time.

I could trust it if I could self-host, but I lack the hardware (disk space, mostly) and the availability (I can't leave my pc on all the time [also I live in México, the internet is terrible and I tend to hog it if I'm downloading something]), so I'd have to trust some random yahoo with my stuff but it wouldn't have what I'm looking for anyway.

I like the concept of delta.chat the most. Anyone here use it? Any reason why it hasn't caught on?

Could it support technical FOSS channels with thousands of participants, like what IRC was awesome for and Matrix seems to be pretty ok at?

That last part is the "problem", I just need something to text and send memes and files, but convincing the people around me to leave animations and stickers behind would be impossible.