No privacy nightmares compared to WhatsApp

My whole point was that between Signal and WhatsApp, none is intrinsically better than the other in this regard. Both are centralized and collect the same amount of privacy-sensitive data about you (your online presence and patterns, your IP, your network graph, the routing of your messages and their nature…), because they need that to function. Whether they log it (irrespective of what they advertise) is one thing nobody but themselves can verify and where opensource plays no role.

Matrix/XMPP are only better because you can self-host if you trust no one, or choose whom to trust, or change whom to trust along the way without incurring a total loss of your contacts, histories, assets, …

IMO, the sales pitch for XMPP/Matrix shouldn't be "we are better/more secure/more privacy focused by design" (and it's pretty clear that the tech-illiterate majority doesn't care anyway), it should be "with us, you will no longer have to jump ship every 5 years in avg. because facebook/google/amazon/some oligarch/… broke their promise/used their absolute power over your account to their discretion".