There are lots of things I could say to agree with you, but all I can do is gesture helplessly.

I don't think Russians actually thought that. Its just that if they publicly pointed out the issues with Telegram and publicly suggested better alternatives, bad things would happen to them.

I've been calling this out for years.

And every time, some commenter goes, "Nu uh, look at their website bro! It's super private!"

SimpleX

Doesn’t signal allow signups without a phone now?

Also second SimpleX that the other person mentioned.

Wire isn't that great. Definitely avoid email as it is riddled with problems that aren't easily fixable despite what the email companies tell you.

Simplex Chat, Signal or possibly Matrix

There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of how everything works here. Any platform will need to provide data to authorities when "asked properly" - as in, receives an actual order from some enforcing body that has authority on the subject in question. No commercial company will fight the CIA in court to protect your data. The best you can hope for is that they minimize what kind of data they collect about you in the first place - in the case of E2EE, they will only have access to IPs and other metadata such as connection timestamps and nothing else. But all of the services you listed will collect at least IPs and most will do phone numbers as well. The only difference with Telegram is that they're transparent about it. You can either avoid using commercial platforms altogether, or use them in a way such that data retrieved from them will be useless. But believing that "Signal will never give my IP to law enforcement" is delusional.

That's the privacy starter pack.

Mid level is Linux, DeGoogled pbone, and openwrt on the router

Make your fed work for you! You pay him a healthy wage for it 🐸

It’s hardly simple: Why not Signal?

Does those apps have unlimited storage? Channel with unlimited subscribers? Or much more

I see a lot of people mention WIRE recently. Did everyone collectively forget how they sold out in 2019 and removed their canary (aka. compromised)?

In July 2019 Wire raised $8.2m investment from Morpheus Ventures and others. On July 18 of the same month, 100% of the company's shares have been taken over by Wire Holdings Inc., Delaware, USA.

Foss code and client side encryption is fine.

Implementing an in-house encryption was raising eyebrows already back then. No e2ee as default was also a red flag since it gives users without proper knowledge a false sense of security.

noone expected this

If I'm being charitable I could presume that they left them so as to not disrupt sting operations