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Comment by Jkvngt | Hacker News Reader

There's no reason to post in the fashion of a glib marketing department person if you're not. And I don't think ANYBODY finds requiring a phone number "because it's discoverable, familiar, usable" is convincing especially when considering that dissidents are apparently one of the major groups this is marketed to.

The whole thing smells funny, there's no reason to require a phone number other than Rosendfeld WANTS it.

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The major group Signal wants to market to is normal people, and they've stated repeatedly that they optimize for that over maximum security with what they consider worse usability.

And even though I disagree with the focus on phone numbers and wish they'd prioritized a model that makes them optional, I do understand the network effect argument for including it. Kind of annoying that the alternatives that do it better have a hard time, but I also have to admit that it proves Moxies point to a degree.

Normal people have no issues creating user handles on Reddit and Discord and Twitter. Again, the only reason to require a phone number is because Rosenfeld wants it.

No, because using phone numbers gives you contact discovery through the phone book "for free" (with further privacy implications Signal has discussed at length). And an entire argument around it providing a social graph independent of service infrastructure that is important for some aspects of user freedom - again something that has been discussed publicly at length, both from Moxie and from other players in the wider messenger ecosystem (many of which at least partially disagree and have made different tradeoffs - but generally acknowledge the tradeoff exists).

How many casual users have you personally convinced to switch to some E2E-encrypted messaging app?

What is stopping someone from running signal on a dedicated burner if they're worried about it?

Different people have different threat models and I think asking for a phone number for the reasons posted above is acceptable for most people.

There really is no such thing as a dedicated burner. you don't even need NSA level threat vectors for most phone sim purchases in western countries to exfiltrate tons of user data.

Wifi is even worse, not better..

I think the best way to get a burner account is to use the free services to receive text messages online. These are enough to create an account, and you can then set a pin to prevent any takeover, assuming you synchronize your account every week.

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