• bestusername
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    3 months ago

    I don’t understand the hype; how many people are chatting with people they don’t know on Signal?

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      With usernames now it would be a better option. Before you had to share your phone number and hence your name

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          You’d share a username, which is way different if you ask me. I don’t mind sharing my username, Kusimulkku, here but I wouldn’t want to share my phone number and real name.

          If you use the username to get into contact then your phone number isn’t visible to them iirc. Same other way around, your username isn’t visible to people you’ve got into contact with a phone number. So no need to worry about your phone number leaking or your friends and family seeing that you also go by “MonsterCock2000” or something.

          • Miss Brainfarts@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            3 months ago

            What I mean is that the username only serves to connect two users. But the profile they then see of each other is their standard Signal profile, with whatever name and other info it contains.

            At least that’s how I understood their blog post

            • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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              3 months ago

              I think that might be true, but you could just have your first name as your name or something less private than full name + phone number etc.

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      3 months ago

      That was exactly my first thought. Might be something for various underground groups, but the normal use case seems to be just regular communication among friends & family.

      • Extras@lemmy.today
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        3 months ago

        But wouldn’t that just put you at risk of spam and other malicious messages?

        • LWD@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          In addition to what the other user said, usernames are both optional and easy to change in order to prevent spammers from finding you. Plus, they can only make so many accounts themselves, with the phone number limitation in tow.

        • something_random_tho@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Matrix isn’t private at all. All metadata is shared+stored by both your server and mine (no sealed sender). Encryption is worse (no double-ratchet) and there’s no guarantee of encryption at all (some clients don’t even offer it). It’s also a lot harder to get set up and IMO the clients are much worse.

    • Chris Ely@fosstodon.org
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      3 months ago

      The people using Signal groups.

      Not being able to prevent everyone in a group from learning your phone number was a particular reason not to use Signal with groups of people that didn’t already know everyone in the group as mutual contacts.

      @bestusername
      @celmit