The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.

First, I don’t like calling proprietary software “official”. Proprietary software is just software with closed source code. What makes something official is someone deciding “OK, this is what we are going to use” or that it definitely came from a particular source. Getting Docker directly from Docker repositories rather from a distributions repository for example.

My general take is if FOSS can do the job, I use FOSS. If FOSS can’t do the job I need, then I will go with the best proprietary solution to my problem. If I go with FOSS, I tend to prefer using the repository of the project in question rather than my distributions repository. The projects repository tends to be more up to date and there are fewer opportunities for ba actors to play with the code. Downside is that these repositories may introduce changes that may bork your OS when/if you upgrade to a newer major version. FlatPacks and AppImages help to mitigate this.

Hope that helps.

Last I’d heard, even the NSA hasn’t been able to find an encryption that is quantum safe. And the some of the one they had found were broken using traditional computers. I strongly suspect that your messages will remain reasonably private for at least the next decade or two.

That’s about right. The matrix protocol, while quite big on protecting messages, is not quite so worried about the metadata. This can be minimized if both users are from the same server.

Whether the metadata leakage is important depends largely on your threat environment.

As for Signal not having anything to be able to hand over… I’m not sure I take them at their word. That may just be me though, I’m a distrusting bastard.

Well, first thing, you should read “allow list” as “federate ONLY with these instances”. Block list is the opposite of that, “DO NOT federate with this instance “.

Try removing everything from your allow and block lists and see what happens.

As far as I know, there isn’t an account migration mechanism in Lemmy yet. I’ve heard (fourth hand at best) that it is in the works but hasn’t been implemented yet. You may have to do it the hard way. Copy, paste and search.