I enjoyed the post and appreciate that more people are looking for privacy focused alternatives to traditional vendors.
Though I'm disappointed hear that one of the conclusions seems to be there's no privacy-focused chat vendor that does something as simple as not collecting identifying information on users until they interact with the chat app, with integrated consent collection (which is essentially what they've implemented with their fork).
Maybe the wider HN community might know of such a service?
There's ton of open source ones, I use intergram (https://github.com/idoco/intergram) but there's more:
- https://github.com/LiveHelperChat/livehelperchat