It’s a good messenger service overall. Never had any significant outages, generous file transfer sizes, groups, etc.

Ignoring any privacy/security debate, it’s really the best message service out there, imo. It does everything you’d want sucha service to do, and you have options for apps to use the service (though the official one is great without doing so).

It has drawbacks, but so does every messaging service out there. For me, the requirement to use a telephone number is limiting. The encryption being out of standard, and requiring an extra step to use, is another. It isn’t something you want to rely on if you need privacy amd security to be top end, but it’s better that discord by a good bit, and at least it isn’t controlled by Google/alphabet or Facebook/meta.

If you’re looking into it for the encrypted messaging, look elsewhere since anyone you’d be communicating with that also requires that being at the top of the list is going to already be using something else anyway. Anyone that isn’t into that is already going to be difficult to get on board, so good luck actually using it encrypted.

But, if you just want a good messenger with decent mass adoption, it’s rock solid. Even my mom uses it a little. So it isn’t only geeks that on it, she’s not exactly fond of extra steps; she’d use sms only if it weren’t for the file transfers and the stickers, which is pretty damn typical of most people lol.

Unlike WhatsApp, it has a desktop client and you can use the same account on multiple devices at the same time.

Its fine, if you have people using it you must talk with. They have rolled their own encryption standard which is always a risk, but they do have a open source client they support which is nice.

If your asking about what platform you should use overall without anchored social contacts… Signal is the gold standard right now.

It’s good for sharing images or videos instead of sending a text messages. Especially if not on an iPhone.

The school I used to teach at used it for official communication among admin and faculty. Never used it since.