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Comment by DavideNL | Hacker News Reader

It baffles me that when you install the Element App (which uses matrix.org by default), you can not easily find any of your friends, because you cant “connect” your phone number…

This makes the App a no-go for everyone and their grandmother. The registration and setup process was so cumbersome, even people with some tech knowledge in my friend circle had trouble getting it to work.

Anyway, it seems so user hostile, why not just make connecting a phone number optional? That would attract many more people?

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You can add your phone number.. But I don't know if it can actually be used to find you, even though it's the stated purpose :). You can find it from Settings/Security and Privacy.

Most probably don't add it anyway because it's far from mandatory (I haven't created an account for some time, but I assume it's not part of the flow), so it probably wouldn't work out great in practice.

I don't use that functionality, but I'm pretty sure it exists:

https://spec.matrix.org/latest/identity-service-api/

https://github.com/matrix-org/sydent

Yea that's correct, it seems to exist; However apparently the default server, matrix.org , does not support it...

(which everyone uses who follows the default App setup flow.)

We disabled it on matrix.org because it was being used for 2FA SMS fraud, costing us $$$K, and we didn't want to burn time building an anti-fraud system. Getting access to everyone's phonebooks is also a privacy risk (even if you do fancy stuff with SGX like Signal does).

Meanwhile, government deployments typically have LDAP or similar to discover users - and so it hasn't come up as a big requirement for the folks generating $. It's on the radar though as one of the main blockers for mainstream uptake... but right now we're trying to keep the lights on first before focusing on accelerating mainstream uptake.

Good to hear the insight, thank you.

That makes sense, hopefully it’s something that can be resolved sometime soon. Would be great if mainstream people have another, privacy conscious, alternative to big tech…

I genuinely can not understand if this is satire or not. Attaching everything to a phone number is the worst thing that happened to messaging.

The part you apparently don’t understand, is that this is (unfortunately) currently the reality: it’s what most people use now. We can’t expect everyone and their grandmother to switch to a perfect e2e alternative overnight.

Meanwhile, i need a way to communicate with everyone, preferably as secure as possible.

But you're not attaching everything to a phone number here, only ease of discovery

> It baffles me

It baffles me that people use corporate surveillance software, and balk at the tiniest of privacy hurdles.

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