It's kinda like lemmy here, but a little more pain because not only do you have to pick your provider, but you also need to be very mindful of how your key pair is managed. Like... don't just uninstall a client without going through the effort of trusting and verifying a new one first, or you may lose the ability to decrypt a lot of history and also break trust with relationships you have.

Security first is a major concern in the system, so it doesn't leave a lot to the imagination unfortunately.

That said, once you convince yourself to set it up, and convince anyone else to do the same, it works pretty nicely. It's like an inner venn diagram of discord, telegram and IRC.