Yeah I know this is a hot take but I don’t really like signal much either, but for me it’s mainly because it is a centralized protocol and they attempt to maintain exclusivity over it (Moxie used to go after third party clients because of this).

That’s why I feel matrix is a way better alternative. It still has the option of being secure with the E2E encryption and so long as you save your keys you can still retrieve older messages on other devices. It also has the ability to create public chats, same as Telegram, but with the addition of Spaces, which can group connected chats together (almost like a discord server, except you can also join each room individually).

Also matrix doesn’t require a phone number to sign up so it’s significantly better than Signal in that regard because signing up with email is much more convenient, and probably more secure than phone number sign-up since you can simply use temporary email services.

might I suggest using Matrix instead? End to end encrypted and fully open source (client and server), plus message history gets synced to new devices (assuming both your old and new clients support it, which nearly all do), and as a bonus it doesn’t store data on a centralized server.

Oh, and it supports sticker packs and custom emoji.

I use Signal a little. While it doesn’t sync full history you still get all new messages going forward which is good enough for me.