The Signal Server repository hasn’t been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.
To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as “open source”, and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 – which raises questions about the legality of this situation).
Signal’s whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. “we can never engage the community directly”, “we will never merge/accept PRs”, etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a “Signal apologist” thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I’m over Signal now.
Conversation UI seems to fall a bit into the uncanny valley of being too modern for old school users and the same time too sober and down to basics for the snap-chat crowd ;)
As for e2ee chats, somehow I don’t have nearly as many problems with it. It mostly just works… no idea why it is different for you.
The UI honestly is just in a weird spot. Make it old school, or make colours customisable for chat bubbles and background. blabber.im, its fork, is beautiful to use, and is definitely not too Snapchatty.
E2EE chats are a pain in the rear across XMPP clients, be it one to one or group. And it has not changed in 20 years of XMPP. This has to be understood that basics like this need to be done right, maybe as a reference client or handful clients taking it upon themselves. Conversations is in the best spot to do it, and TailsOS is picking up Dino or Gajim as its default XMPP Torified client, so one of them, likely Dino, will become great as well.