A feature can be turned off. Phone numbers are mandatory for a signal account

Of course there are alternatives. That’s the cherry on top of this crap pile: only regular non tech folks are affected. Nerds and actual criminals will just run an xmpp or simplex server and not care about the legislation.

Simplex is pretty nice, but to me XMPP already does all that you described, and metadata isn’t that important to me. Plus XMPP has better clients for mobile and desktop

How do you dl them? yt-dlp is asking to pass credentials as well.

I find this site useful to compare messengers. I would trust Wire a tad more because it’s hosted in a country with stronger GDPR regulation, vs Signal being hosted in the US.

For my needs, XMPP with Omemo has been unbeatable for a long time

The level of comfort, or rather lack thereof, you’re fine with dictates how you’ll use your devices. Privacy is mandatory to me, so every app that refuses to work with my setup gets the boot. Banking is done in the browser with a separate PIN device. The moment the device gets discontinued I’ll go back to paper or phone like an old person. FOSS apps are FOSS and will break because they don’t have millions of ad money to fund development. I know that and learned to accept that fixing setups is part of my digital life. That’s just one end of the spectrum though. Everyone needs to find their balance with privacy to avoid getting fed up by it.

Chat control is more of a threat for the less tech literate masses. It will have to be implemented client and / or server side. If you use foss software it’s basically impossible to enforce chat control, because some dude in his basement can always fork any project that may get targeted by it. If you’re privacy conscious and using linux, degoogled android and decentralized messengers you’re already out of reach of chat control.

Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t a threat and we shouldn’t fight it.