Signal requires phone number in order not to store your contact list on their servers. Instead of id's/email addresses/nicknames they are using your phone contact list. IMHO that's better for privacy.
The alternative is getting a burner SIM-card. Though, that will become harder once more prepaid providers require your ID.
Or if you did mean Colombia, why would the average HNer have friends there?
I know their infra codebase pretty well as I've worked on it for projects unrelated to Signal/Open Whisper Systems. Unfortunately their public Github is usually ~3 months behind their running infra and often released much later than the equivalent functionality in the clients hits the public.
It is: https://mobile.twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217
> Our goal with PINs is to enable non-phone # based addressing. Since that will mean your Signal contacts can't live in your address book anymore, they're Signal's responsibility. Every other messenger does this by storing them in plaintext, but that's not private, so we built SVR.
It's been a few months since I worked with their codebase but at the time it relied on Intel SGX for the contact storage Enclave, which is now considered compromised[0]. Additionally, if you wanted to run your own, the requirements to get licensed to use the Enclave are non-trivial.
Opinions are my own, I represent no one, etc, etc.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/hacke...
That does not make sense. There is no relation between 'using phone number as id' and 'storing contact list on servers'. E-mail and same other communication protocols also do not use phone numbers and do not store contact list on servers.
I'm not an advocate for Signal, but I totally get this approach.