I still use Signal, and I have done so for over a decade. I was a huge advocate for it years ago. It's just not my first choice anymore and most non-technical people I convinced to use Signal stopped using it when Signal ripped out SMS support.

I've been moving people off of it to Matrix servers for a while now and with the new library resolving a bunch of "unable to decrypt" issues, it's note ready for non-technical users.

It's not just the ability to choose your server, but also a choice of clients, and they don't collect phone numbers (in fact most people that I set up didn't even have to provide an email address!).

SimpleX reminds me a lot of Briar, which is a very good thing. I'm intetested in using it more and seeing how it goes.