I think there are some concerns that Session has made too many security compromises. Enough noise that I am not interested in using it.

It also wouldn’t be the one that comes to mind as a good choice for non-technical users.

I would still lean toward Signal for non-technical users unless the requirement to use a phone number for creating the account is a non-starter, or you require anonymity from the provider (beyond E2E encryption of messages).

Wire might be a decent option if your primary focus is message encryption and pseudonymous accounts.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/19045-dont-use-session-signal-fork

I mean online providers like jmp.chat, my sudo, and virtualsim will hook you up for a couple of bucks. So sure, if you are seriously cash constrained or crypto is unobtainable for you, then not so easy.

The strong bias seems to be toward Torrents instead of USENET? Why? Cost of providers with decent retention?

I always assume that Usenet (with anonymous payment and a separate VPN) is a safer option than torrenting since I’m not the one publishing / sharing content. A copyright holder would have to go after that Usenet host (with a general court order), extract logs from them (if they exist), figure out who was actually infringing on copyright, then go after the VPN provider, to deanonymize me.

Burner numbers are pretty easy to come by…

I had thought Wire was mostly frowned upon for their collection of metadata. I hear ypu though with Signal’s phone number requirement (even though ypu can hide it), and single identity.