Replacing the need to register with a phone number with a requirement to pay is a better option how, exactly ?
When using payment as proof, they can verify that payment occurred, validate the account and then immediately forget about the transaction. One spammer would still have to pay 10^99 times to create that many accounts.
If they accept monero or something then ok but I doubt they will.
Ideally they accept Monero and do unlinkable payments but I doubt they will accept Monero. Hopefully they accept some crypto.
It's already the case today (and has been for years) that you don't need to give strangers your phone number to chat on Signal. My username is soatok.45; try to get my phone number if you can.
If you want absolutely no info to be collected, ever, and there to be zero cost on the end user too, be prepared to welcome your new spam overlords. Because the people who will benefit the most from a zero cost signup that only requires a username are spammers.
They are [1] implementing unlinkable payments so all that is known by credit card is that you purchased Signal and Signal doesn't know which credit card goes with which account.
>Signal is an obvious honeypot.
Claims without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. You might say they don't do enough to protect metadata privacy but it was never made to be an anonymous messenger, it was made to be a private messenger. You can easily check the end-to-end encryption in the code (reproducible builds on all platforms except iOS BTW!). This person audited Signal recently [2].
>They make no money and have no plans to.
They make money from donations and paid backups and they might make money from paid accounts.
[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/7da3357b5...
[2] https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-us...
A messaging service filled with bots and spammers is not usable, and possibly not affordable to Signal (what proportion of resources would be spent on spam/bots). What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Lots of security geeks want Signal to adopt practices unusable to the public. They've made clear that unsusable security is not in their mission.
I'd use something that's truly decentralised but signal is just another walled garden like WhatsApp. Just one that promises to behave better. But what's a promise worth these days?
A decentralised network would mean a guarantee that they can't do anything bad. I'll take that over promises and good intentions any day.
I don't care about the masses. If signing up for a matrix account is too annoying for them they don't really care about privacy anyway. After all it's the same they have to do for any online shop. Just create a username and password. Somehow it's not a problem for the masses if they wanna order a phone charger but for matrix it's suddenly 'too complicated'?
Remember how everyone jumped on Google when they promised to do no evil? Now they're one of the most abundant mass surveillance companies in the world and we can't move away because they're too big to fail.
Signal is one sale away from being evil too. They might not do it but we've been conned so many times that I will only take technical guarantees, not promises that can be broken.
And really, lots of progress is made in real open communications. Matrix is getting more mature by the day. NATO uses it, the French government and several others. And the good thing is, you can always run your own server and connect to the hive. Nobody can tell you what to do, nobody can tell you to surveil your users like the EU is planning to do.
We need something truly open. Not a WhatsApp light.
For me the difference is in the ownership. Who owns each. Which is BigCorp? That’s why I trust one more than the other.
Since when is giving out your phone number a "more private" option ?