I low-key hope someone would fork it and make it live a life of its own.

Yes, having a purely non-profit foundation from the start would have been better.

But, for me, it is still a better option than Signal or Matrix for messaging.

Signal is great but they need 10s of millions every year of donations. It means that they rely on the generosity of wealthy individuals to keep going. I'm worried it is not sustainable.

Matrix is better on this aspect since everything is open source, but the UC is not great on my opinion and I don't fell comfortable switching to it for regular contract with family and friends. To be fair it's been a while I haven't used it so I downloaded Element but I am blocked on the account creation (the verification email is not arriving).

To compare I tried creating a new account with SimpleX and in less than a minute I was ready to chat. They rely on investors for now and don't have a clear business model which is worrying but they are developping fast this way and being fully open source anyone could fork it at any time. The UX is great despite being heavily focused on privacy and security and have features that no other app have, you don't need an email or phone to chat and if they ever start to enshitify someone can fork it.

Do pragmatically I think it is the best alternative right now and I am curious to see how they evolve.

You're trusting whoever runs the hardware that they're not snooping on you

How is it a lot harder to track if the FBI can just subpoena the sysadmin for server/room logs?

With respect, this viewpoint is not defensible from an operational security perspective.

It’s like saying they should use GMail because they have hundreds of millions of users. When the problem isn’t being a needle in haystack, but rather the fact that Google will gladly look through your private data and happily hand it over to the authorities.