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I'd consider the way you're asking for the feature. There was definitely an air of "this is such a simple feature why can't I just have it it should be no trouble for everyone involved it's just a username". I think if people asking for this feature were to spitball through it and acknowledge the tradeoffs rather than incessantly repeat how uncompromising they are in their need for usernames and their need for Signal to have them yesterday, the conversation wouldn't seem so volatile. I actually wasn't trying to dive in and sling mud. I see this conversation all the time on HN and, coming across it again, wanted to suggest that maybe another product with usernames would work better for these people since literally every time Signal comes up on HN the peanut gallery shoots off with tired smears and entitled quips about how Signal users phone numbers.

The strong response you encounter is people trying to communicate that it isn't that simple for them. That it means enough of a shift in Signal's model that they're really worried about the change to the product if Signal implemented it, not least because it changes the very thing that drew them to the product in the first place. And unfortunately, it seems the worries are not unfounded. I genuinely don't think many of the people asking for usernames would want them if the proposition was clear: "you can have them but you have to trust us with your contacts book and personal information". It's the catch22: in order to have the privacy of a username, you must give up the privacy you'd win. For some people, they trust Signal with that responsibility more than their carrier (like a VPN) and it's a good tradeoff.

Me? What was compelling about Signal is that it was my contacts book and encrypted communication. No accounts/profiles, no passwords, no proprietary software, no invasive product analytics, just a global DB associating phone numbers with pubkeys. That was my pipe dream but I also acknowledge I'm not the center of the world either: in the same way you begrudgingly use Signal with a phone number, it's also not the end of the world for me if we have yet another company out there where I need to maintain a profile and stick a password in my password manager and login periodically. But sadly, if Signal gets to that point, it ultimately means the "Signal experiment" portion of the product's life will have come to an end. <- This, more than anything else, is why the suggestions to go use one of the products that already provide the experience you're looking for is apropos and not dismissive. We don't want the experiment to end. The entire point of championing Signal in the first place was idea that we could collectively participate in a product that didn't do what everyone else on the internet did and send off all your data to their servers the minute you opened their app.



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