OTOH it's nice to have an alternative client. If E2EE messenger system is going to lock itself down hard, trying to "protect" itself from the user even harder than third party adversaries, then I personally see no point - might as well use Whatsapp.

I miss the times IM software respected, or at least didn't fight hard to defeat, the end-user's freedom to computing on their own device, which includes viewing and sending messages through whatever interface they see fit, including indirectly as part of a script/automation. But that was all before E2EE era, hell, before mobile dominance.

  > might as well use Whatsapp.

  - still scrapes metadata
  - run by company who's entire objective is to profile you

You know signal is open source, right? That's why Molly exists. They can run their own servers too.

Now I wish you could do both. Talk in both signal and the decentralized molly servers. I wish signal had a mesh like feature since it's way harder to snoop on conversations if you have to be physically near. I even wish Signal made the signal sticker site accessible from inside the app. There's tons of things they should do but let's not pretend that just because they're not perfect that we should use apps from a company whose motto might as well be "be evil".