Lots of services you'd rather have an anonymous account with (Google, Meta, Discord) are partially/fully mandating phone numbers as a spam mitigation strategy. Also this paves the way to internet connections/mobile internet requiring ID
Simultaneously, Signal is trying to raise the cost of accounts by requiring phone numbers. Although spammers can get mass amounts of phone numbers, it will at least raise the cost. Email 0 cents, phone # 10 cents–there will be less spammers with phone #s.
I don't think we'd have to worry about the spam if people only used usernames instead of phone numbers, because it would be massively harder for spammers to find your account and message you. But, with usernames, you don't get the contact discovery that allows for growth.
I don't understand why this is so controversial. If you follow the news on the slightest the game right now is feds raiding journalists, taking their devices and then trying to unmask their sources. It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for", when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop.
>Simplex is run by borderline grifters
The developers' character is irrelevant—the code is open source (agpl) and trustless. The whole point of e2ee is that it doesn't matter what the server is running.
>Tor isn't a messenger
I never claimed it is—Tor is an anonymity network that helps make SimpleX the most anonymous messenger. You run Orbot on your phone routing your SimpleX traffic through it. SimpleX has no identifiers, and Tor protects the network level so you have no traffic that can be correlated.
>I don't understand why this is so controversial. If you follow the news on the slightest the game right now is feds raiding journalists, taking their devices and then trying to unmask their sources. It doesn't matter what XYZ is "for", when the stakes are this high we need to be protecting people full stop.
You aren't addressing my point. You can't make a great service with a threat model that encompasses every threat. Signal is a great option for everyday messaging—its architecture was never designed to be anonymous, it is centralized and mainstream. High stakes don't change what a tool was built to do; recommending it to journalists as though it provides anonymity is the wrong thing to do. Signal sacrifices anonymity in order to gain popularity.
I will say Signal is fine for 99% of journalists and their sources. The only metadata that Signal provides to law enforcement is account creation date[1].