this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12200311

Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private

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[–] LWD@lemm.ee 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)
[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Jami doesn't require a phone number, which is p2p. Xmpp (+ Omemo) doesn't require a phone number and it's federated... I mean, if a service is willing to rid of phone numbers, it'll do totally without them.

[–] vorpuni@jlai.lu 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The challenge of having your device solve a nasty PoW that takes minutes would not deter most people: a timer once is better than evil captchas, phone numbers, etc. I don't understand why they use hCaptcha and not that.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)
[–] vorpuni@jlai.lu 0 points 1 year ago

A lot, but farming phone numbers from poor countries is also cheap and Signal sends them insanely expensive SMS. There is no perfect solution, spammers aren't stupid. Since Signal is centralised they can enforce PoW incrementally if they get reports for spam, I still think it is way better than hCaptcha which is garbage.

[–] Scolding0513@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

phone numbers for spam prevention are a bandaid for a mediocre solution. the mediocre aspect being that it's totally centralized when it should at least be federated like SimpleX. SimpleX is the ultimate solution to be honest with you, it's federated, fast, extremely private and extremely secure.

[–] RandoCalrandian@kbin.social -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It’s the signal metadata that they want to keep associated with an identity

They still can fulfill government requests for who is talking to who and how often

[–] cjf@feddit.uk 7 points 1 year ago

Got proof for that last claim?

I thought their sealed sender feature was meant to prevent exactly this scenario.