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Check out https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/blob/master/doc/prot.... It is metadata-free. It does not require a centralized server. It uses Tor.

Goals of the project (solved):

    Users aren't personally identifiable by contacts or their address
    Communication is authenticated and private
    No person or server can access contact lists, message history, or other metadata
    Resist censorship and monitoring at the local network level
    Resist blacklisting or denial of service against users
    Accessible and understandable for non-technical users
    Reliability and interactivity comparable with traditional IM services

OK, the accessibility part is not implemented, but that is besides the point. I am not arguing in favor of using Ricochet here, so it does not matter anyways. FWIW, it has been audited.

> The answer is, Signal doesn't have a way to offer "usernames only" which wouldn't almost immediately explode the services usage far, far beyond what they can plausibly sustain in server costs.

Why can’t they let heavy users run their own servers?

> Signal without the phone number requirement becomes THE way to move data from anything to anything - malware would be written which setup a Signal account and used that for command and control.

Element doesn't require a phone number and I have no malware issues... also email doesn't.

i call this a bs strawman. this is just nonsense because as you said, element and email are perfect examples of decentralized networks. you also have fediverse that woks on trust between a local network as well as any trusted servers, still that system doesn't just explode.

I do not even know what the problem is. Being able to create as many accounts as one wants? How is that used for "command and control" though? I am missing something here I think.

I don't see it either.. maybe a Signal employee posted this comment to try to justify phone number collection because they can sell those at a premium (or a secret order from the Gov. forces them to do it).

Also, what I want is accounts protected solely by username and password (actually, just a 50 character password without login would satisfy me)... this is one reason why I am slowly moving away from gmail. 2FA doesn't help me because I use my own device to login and if they get compromised, I am screwed either way.

> Signal uses phone numbers as identifiers because it controls spam.

Signal uses phone number as identifiers because it's the easiest way to find other users. There's no other reason Signal uses phone numbers as a primary ID.

I wonder if I ever needed contact discovery, as in, actual contact discovery, such as: you start typing foo, then you get "foobar, "foobaz", and so forth. It definitely complicates things.

This. Your phone number is your social graph.

In India at least unused numbers are recycled back to new subscribers after 6 or so months of no activity. Blocking merely on the basis of the phone number would create issues in the future though