There isn't even a date for the release of threads in any of the available client :/

Also remember you must have a phone number to use signal.

It is useful for talking to people you know in real life, but that's it.

As to the user friendliness, I find more infuriating bugs (and "features") with signal these days, although that was not always the case. For example, if history is not restored on launch it is lost forever, this is a problem if you're e.g. going to a privacy hostile nation and need your history clean for the trio but want to restore it when you get back. Another particularly heinous violation is that the signal app has code in it that slows it's functionality if the version is out of date, pressuring you to update.

Seems like it's decentralized and uses Tor natively.

When the Cellebrite malware was added to Signal by the developer(s) I mentioned that Cellebrite was used by legitimate phone carriers to transfer data between an old phone and a new phone.

I asked why my elderly mother, with whom I speak to over Signal, should be liable for a potentially broken Cellebrite machine (costing thousands) if the Signal malware were to break it. There's no precedent on whether or not she'd be liable, so there's a possibility she would be.

She never consented to her phone being used as a weapon. She doesn't understand the stuff going on. She uses Signal because it's simple, easy to understand, I'm just a few button presses away (we don't live near each other) and the call quality is unmatched.

I got a few very angry responses, telling me to uninstall Signal if I wasn't willing to be an activist for their agenda. They were perfectly okay with their philosophy being projected onto their users and didn't see any issue in the fact that users did not consent to it.

Which is strange, because they're annoyed with other Big Tech firms doing... well, the same exact thing.

I really hope Matrix improves its UX since I would immediately switch my family over to it if they could just understand how it worked.