I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.
As far as I know you can’t host your own signal server which connects to their servers.
I’m using Signal with the rest of the family and most friends.
That’s right, Signal is not federated.
Yeah they killed federation, though I can’t disagree with the reason. Thankfully you don’t need to trust the server
You can technically set it up base on the published code, but you’d need to modify the client as well. Not like it’s Matrix or XMPP, asking you for server address upon registration. I am afraid to think how much of the server dependence is hardcoded there…