You seem to be highly misinformed what metadata is. A server for example will always have access to unencrypted IP addresses from the clients connecting to it, this is impossible to avoid unless you use a service like Tor that relays internet traffic, but that has very little to do with “encryption”.
According to signal facts all the have is your phone number and and the date you signed up for the service and the last day you connected to the server. IP address are not logged or stored the do t have access to it and signal has said this everytime the get a warrent for user data. So yes it is possible to have a secure service that doesn’t collect IP addresses but yes the do have some limited data so you are correct.
That is all they claim to store for later retrival*, which is not the same as what they would be able to capture in real-time and hand over to law-enforcement if forced to by a court (and they wouldn’t be able to tell you about it because of a gag-order).
*However this claim is contradicted by the source-code of their server (which they sometimes publish) which seems to store significantly more and of course this is assuming the code is indeed the same as the one they run on their servers, which is unclear.
Edit: and their servers run on AWS, so even if Signal itself doesn’t store the IP addresses, Amazon certainly could.
Very good and true point well said I agree with you on that good thing I am not important enough for it to be a issue lol or do anything illegal.
Another thing a server can easily access is the timestamp of messages. Even if that is somehow stored encrypted in the server, messages are sent in real time and the server can easily log those, so an e2e encryption chat service will at the very least have logs with IP and timestamps. This can’t really be avoided.
