The price of freedom is eternal vigilance which in this case means staying up on and switching up your tech stack constantly. The solutions are generally straightforward, but the implementations are seemingly too difficult for most. With digital, self host everything you can and use FOSS everywhere you can. With physical, pay cash and leave as few footsteps and facial images as you can.
It is great but only missing a desktop client.
When Signal is compromised or compelled, you won’t know it happened. It may have happened already.
Even if Signal might be better for those people’s current threat model, people’s habits are hard to change. Good luck getting them onto a better decentralized protocol later. Most people will not take the time to understand the importance of decentralization and think we are just making their lives difficult. I regret getting people onto Signal mainly for this reason.
I have a similar 321 strategy without using someone else’s server and needing to traverse the internet. I keep my drive in the pool shed, since if my house was to blow up or get robbed, the shed would probably be fine.
I deal with this by subscribing to very few mainstream media sources since they typically report the same thing in unison with slight variation. The slight variation makes deduplication technically difficult. I use Nextcloud News, and maybe their future LLM models could accomplish this.