It's open source and you can self host it.

You know it includes a backdoor for the government.

The bigger question mark for me is. Is this still at risk from the online safety act that seems to be killing lots of smaller UK communities/games?

Slack belongs to Salesforce (US), Discord is based in the US, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple...

Not saying this is better, but is definitely not worse. At least in Europe there is the GDPR, whereas in the US there is a president officially supporting corruption [1].

If you care about privacy, you have to go for open source end-to-end encryption. Probably Signal. At least this you can self-host.

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...