A lot of privacy guides suggest avoiding Telegram. I understand that in its default mode there’s no E2EE (and no E2EE for groups at all). If people I know don’t wanttko use Signal, isn’t Telegram the lesser evil given it’s nicer privacy policy (than other popular ones)?
Say I use the FOSS version of it.
The server’s trustworthiness does not matter for Signal. The app is designed to work securely regardless of the server. Moreover, even if the server software is open source, you cannot be sure that they run the same code that they publish.