Oh yeah I use Element for public groups, I don't expect privacy. Same as Telegram. Lots of good groups and channels but never expect it to be private.
Since SimpleX is still a bit hit and miss with groups (I've tried to setup a few recently and it's still very buggy) what do you use there if you want privacy?
Signal is solid but obviously requires a phone number. Session is mostly reliable these days but there's questionable choices made in design like forking Signal and removing forward secrecy.
Wickr was actually pretty decent but the consumer version is now R.I.P.
What about good old school XMPP? Self-hostable, interoperable between servers, battle tested. Still a lot of active development, Conversations on Android is a great client, and the OMEMO E2EE (based on the Signal Protocol) is pretty solid iirc.