What are your others? I use signal alot personally and haven't had too many issues.

  - Still need a phone number
  - They refuse to post the app on f-droid (directly)
  - No 3rd party clients allowed on their servers.
  - Crypto thing they attempted
  - I don't trust Moxie, he rubs me the wrong way.

What do you recommend as an alternative?

XMPP with OMEMO e2ee. Fallback to jitsi meet for video calling, although several xmpp clients support video calling to each other.

Jitsi Meet is pretty good for video, and relatively easy to self-host, though you'll need some decent resources for it. The docker-jitsi-meet project[0] can get you started quickly

Signal's "source available" infra can be self-hosted but it's huge effort and relies on a bunch of cloud-specific services which need to be replaced with self-hostslable alternatives. It's also extremely poorly documented and the code quality is fairly mediocre. I wouldn't recommend trying to host Signal infra yourself; it can be done; I've done it at work and it took some months of effort, and maintaining it is a nightmare (or was, then at least) because they'd only push one huge update to GitHub quarterly or less often.

[0]https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet