I am really confused why not more people consider switching to the Conversations XMPP client (or the blabber.im fork).
It has all the features comparable to WhatsAPP/Telegram/Signal/Matrix etc. but is fully libre, e2ee, decentralized and by far the most privacy preserving. And you can easily use a XMPP Desktop client like Gajim or Dino with the same account.
And there are tens of thousands local and non-profit XMPP servers to use and self-hosting a XMPP server for your and your friends & family can be easily done on a RasberryPI from home or really cheap VPS (contrary to Matrix).
There is really no comparable alternative out there, so it is really baffling that it gets recommended so rarely.
Here is another list of XMPP servers: https://xmpp-servers.404.city/ or https://list.jabber.at/
For hosting yourself, Prosody or Ejabberd are recommended. The easiest way to host a Prosody server is using the Snikket preconfigured images. Or check out the guides here.
Edit: another good source (in German): https://www.freie-messenger.de/sys_xmpp/server/
I also like to mention Yunohost for people who might not be ready to jump that far into server admin but don’t mind starting something basic (it comes with XMPP).
https://yunohost.org/
Been meaning to try and set this up on an old spare computer for a while. Might finally do it.