Eh, you'd have to operate a server in the country, and TLS in and out of Egypt is MITMed and outright blocked in many areas from what I've seen when playing with VOIP over there.

At least they would have proper encryption within their country. Apparently, depending on central services outside their country makes it too easy to block.

Then you have to deal with regulations inside the country itself, I doubt its a free for all inside Egypt network wise.

E2E encryption via OTR would largely mitigate that as long as keys could be exchanged out of band.

If countries will block messaging services why do you think they won't raid / shut down servers?

I really don't understand the hating on Signal for not fulfilling all of everyone's use cases. There is an SMS/ MMS fork called Silence (available on F-Droid). If that's a feature users want they have an option.

Or just setup Tor and keep using whatever they were using before.

XMPP is really hard to scale. It's a very chatty protocol, with tons of XML overhead.

Sure it is. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0365.html

[citation needed]