Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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signal requires a phone number and won't even allow you to send sms to those that aren't on signal.
its better, but still not great.
If you need to send sms to someone not on signal, why not just send them an sms
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A truly ethical replacement would not need a phone number
And it would have as much spam as email.
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How about Delta Chat? At least as secure as Signal, open source, and decentralized.
Not saying that it's necessarily a bad option, but my biggest issue with delta chat is that it does not offer forward secrecy (if a user's private key is compromised, past messages can be revealed); Signal does. Delta no question beats signal in decentralization, though email is less decentralized than it seems--how many people do you know who still use gmail? Delta also inherently leaks metadata on whom you're communicating with to the email host (that's just imap/smtp). Signal can mitigate this somewhat with Sealed Sender (which gives one-way anonymity), though it can be broken with statistical analysis, and signal metadata is more identifying due to requiring a phone number.
I will switch to signal when I can avoid installing stuff on bunch of my devices. Until web version is available, sorry it hard for me to switch and for me to convince other people to switch.