Comment by cookiengineer

1,2 and in part 3 were already fixed with the Signal FOSS fork back then, but Moxie and his army of lawyers decided to send out multiple cease and desist letters against those projects. Which, in return, makes Signal not open source, no matter what the claims are. If they don't hold up their end of the license and argue with their proprietary (and closed to use) infrastructure then I'd argue they are no better than Telegram or WhatsApp. Signal's backup problem is another story which might blow up my comment too much.

Because of your mentioned points I would never recommend Signal, and rather point to Briar as a messenger and group/broadcast platform. Currently, it's still a little painful to use and e.g. QR Codes would already help so much with easing up the connection and discovery/handshake process.

But it has huge potential as both a messenger and a federated and decentralized platform.