I have my HN name @gmail.com, but I've never used it, because the amount of junk/mistakes I get from people who don't understand what their email address is. I wonder how bad that problem would be for me with the same name on Signal.<p>I also wonder about personas. Are there privacy ramifications to which name you pick? Can you pick multiple so community X knows you as A and Y knows you as B?<p>Sounds kinda silly, but for a private-by-default messenger, there are interesting UX problems.
It seems this won't remove the requirement for a phone number, rather it will serve as an alternative ID of sorts, same way Telegram does it now, they no longer allow signing up without a number.
Wow this is really nice I downloaded the app and yes you need a number to verify to signup but you can choose to not share your number to groups and you can turn off the ability to find you by your number. And only use your username.
Did they post anywhere how the pulled it off, overcoming the obstacles that held up this feature (which I don't remember, other than they were legit)?
Terrible Discord-like idea of username plus 2-digit extension! First, 2-digits is not enough. How many Johns are out there? What's the point of having just 100 Johns? Either make it unique or not without hardcoding this numerical extension madness!
The linked page is on signalusers.org, but Signal's regular home site is <a href="https://signal.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://signal.org/</a>.<p>I'm looking all over signal.org for some link from there to signalusers.org, as that would make me more relaxed about the authenticity of the latter -- i.e., that it really is run by the same people who run signal.org.<p>Yes, maybe I'm being paranoid. But we're talking about an app whose whole purpose is secure communications :-).
That's nice, but all of those features, such as usernames, make me understand how Telegram was so well-planned from scratch. Everybody has been catching up since. Telegram is really an impressive piece of software.