> What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Since when is giving out your phone number a "more private" option ?
> What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Since when is giving out your phone number a "more private" option ?
You don't have to give out your phone number. You can mint an arbitrary "username" and give the username out to people.
If it's not, let us know a solution (to Signal's actual problem as stated in the GP) that is more private.
One possible solution is to only be able to contact someone if you have received an invitation code from them out of band. E.g. "scan this QR code to add me on signal". Such an invitation code should default to single-use but users should be allowed to generate standing invitations so that businesses and the like can print and post one in their store or whatever. Start getting spam from one of your standing invitations? Just revoke it and make a new one. Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions than the half baked one I came up with after thinking about it for a minute, they're clever cookies.
Welcome back to “key signing parties”. PGP never got enough adoption. At least Signal is simple enough that the (ahem) leaders of the US can (mostly) manage to use it.
Leaders of the US use an Israeli backdoored version of Signal (TM-Signal) TeleMessage by Smarsh was used by DOD, CPB, and others for records retention reasons... also hacked to smithereens.
Requiring manual key verification is a bad design that doesn't scale or benefit most people.
People seem to get on with Discord invite links just fine. You don't have to do the "confirm that all these emoji are the same on both your devices" dance to stop spam.