The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn’t something your friends have or are willing to get, then it’s not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I’m a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn’t be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it’s still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.
I think I may not be presenting my position well, and thus am coming off as a right wing partisan hack of the sort that wants to defund the EPA. That’s not my position.
A lot of people (mostly conservatives and big businesses) that complain about ‘red tape’ as a way of attacking various regulations. For example, people will say it’s impossible to build a power plant because of environmental red tape.
A lot of that regulation is positive though. For example, even if the land is cheap, you can’t build a power plant next to a nature preserve because the pollution will kill all the birds. And I like that regulation. The power people will of course complain as will the mines that were going to sell the plant coal. In cases like this, IMHO, they can all fuck off.
At the same time though, the ‘red tape’ that many businesses complain about does sometimes actually exist. That is, to do business you have to get endless streams of licenses, approvals, permits, etc for things where the bureaucracy and licensing process adds little or no value to either the industry or the population at large.
From what I’ve read, this sort of thing exists a lot in Germany. I’ve talked to a few people who were starting a business in Europe and they specifically avoided a few countries for that reason.