Signal is an open-source privacy-focused end-to-end encrypted texting platform (so competing with SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, and similar). It’s developed by a donation-funded non-profit organization.

Signal is quite good compared to the competition, but it faces a lot of scrutiny because they make big promises about privacy and security so the people who care will really get into the details on that. Also IIRC there was a period when one of their competitors was trying to slander them more or less.

In general there’s nothing wrong with Signal and it’s quite a good option. If you really care about the privacy details you can always host your own instance (but that would require you to convince your friends to use your instance … it’s not federated).

Note that this is sent at time of syncing rather than being in an archive on the company’s server 24/7

I only let things I trust are secure (e.g. ssh) have access from the internet, other services I hide behind a VPN (e.g. Tailscale).

Most routers have a feature to assign static IPs to a specific MAC address. You can also tell most devices to try to take a specific IP instead of using DHCP.

There are multiple ways to set it up, but it’s very possible to set a specific device to always have the same local IP, which is usually the first step to many self-hosting scenarios.

Neat!

Any chance you could share some resources on how you did it? I’d kinda like to give it a try…