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.
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.