By way of analogy: In every HN thread about Firefox there are dozens of comments by people who say that they just couldn't use Firefox because page loads are so awfully slow.

Consider that for a second: HN readers are willing to give their entire browsing history to Google in return for at the very worst a few dozen microseconds of load time saved.

The equivalent here is, that for non telephone number identifiers you have to create a whole UI for actually adding/discovering people. That's the equivalent of the few microseconds. You can argue that it's not a big deal, but it's exactly the type of friction in the ecosystem that hinders adoption ("I already have your phone number, why do I need another number to contact you? Know what, I'll just send you an SMS.").

And it's exactly the type of UI/UX problem that prevented encrypted email adoption ("Download a new program and some sort of key for you? I'll just send you an email directly, I'll figure this out later...").

I don’t want to be discovered. I want to give you my pseudonymous pointer and you can ping me to connect.

Using phone numbers to ‘discover’ doesn’t solve the problem you say prevented encrypted email adoption, that’s a next step in the dance.

There are exactly two pseudonymous identifiers that have "made it". Both associated to technological revolutions. One is phone numbers, the other is email. You put them on business cards and save them in your contacts.

This is strong evidence that this is a hard problem. No other identifiers have been successful long term.

And yes, this absolutely prevents encrypted email adoption. Imagine if switching to encrypted was like installing signal (back in the SMS fall back days).

It's: "Hey use this email client, it automatically detects when the person you're mailing also has an encryption capable client and then all your communication with that person is encrypted."

vs.

"Hey use this EMail client, and if you find out that someone you know is also using it, you can go to this menu item here and search this database in order to find out how to email them securely, and if that doesn't work just email them normally to get a public key from them, before you send them the document you wanted to send."

No guarantee that the former would work, but it would have a fighting chance.

Of course such a solution isn't possible partly due to usage patterns that email has that would break. But that's why I'm relatively forgiving of Signals strict stance on shooting down these type of feature requests. Because they actually have massively improved secure communication for more than a billion people.

On the contrary, this is precisely the discovery many users do not want. 1. Someone you know can discover you’re using this channel. 2. You can’t use the same channel both overtly and with deniability. I should be able to have as many faces for speech as I choose.

If you need deniable encryption today use WhatsApp. Done.

Use the phone number just to prevent spam (though it can't prevent one user having multiple accounts using the same phone number).

This will serve two use cases:

1. People who need simple private IM like WhatsApp can continue using it without asking for A or without giving it any heed.

2. Or you go for A and you are communicating w/o any real world identity attached to your messages.

1. Use the device's address book (phone numbers).

2. Use Facebook Connect (FB id).

3. Store the entire social graph on the server (custom identifiers).

I think #3 is what every messenger that offers non-phone identifiers does (Snapchat, Twitter, Telegram, Wire, Viber, etc).

The reason is simple: if someone does manage to create a social network by slowly discovering a bunch of usernames from their friends, but then they reinstall the app or get a new phone, it would be pretty unusable if that entire social graph was just... gone. It's bad enough to have to create this social graph from scratch, but to do it every time you reinstall, lose your phone, or get a new device?

The consequence is that many people advocating for this feature (or using other messengers because of it) probably don't understand what it is that they're really advocating for or getting themselves into.

Right now Signal is much more "private" than any other messenger, if you measure that by how much Signal knows about you (timestamp of account creation is the only thing iirc). By supporting a custom identifier, they would have to store your entire social graph, like other less private messengers.

On iPhone, after a hardware upgrade w/ restore, Threema offers to restore your client side graph from a client side backup.

Maybe. Or it could be because they don't want to. People equipped to solve one problem may not want to solve another, related problem. It might not be a priority, interest, or motivation for them. That's not apathy; that's decision-making.

(1) allocating developer time and organizational priorities; or,

(2) a technical incompatibility with Signal's existing, phone number-based model?

Based on your response I'm inferring (1), but I'm frustrated that this is never directly answered when the topic comes up.

I seriously don't understand what people expect in these discussions, though. The situation is straightforward. A small but vocal minority of Signal's user base wants non-phone-number identification. Signal hasn't prioritized that feature. Put up, or use a different messenger. How is this complicated?

Don't pick horrible messengers, like ones where encryption isn't enabled by default, or doesn't even exist for group messages, or isn't built on a protocol anyone understands or has reviewed. But even with that constraint, you have options.

Have you done a survey before arriving to this conclusion. If so, I'd love to take a look at it, if possible. Otherwise, I can't see how you can make this assertion; everything can be dismissed as a "small but vocal minority".

As a previous signal user, I stopped using signal because I discovered this issue.

(Also, it's kinda funny that Signal has reimplemented the iMessage problem -- you have to unregister your phone number on your website so people can SMS you again rather than continuously sending you Signal messages unintentionally.)

(There are also other problems that have bubbled up in Signal in the past year since I stopped using it -- I've heard there's an auto-backup process that takes more than an hour and makes your phone unusable and you cannot change when it happens.)

More importantly, I'm still very interested in seeing the data behind your vocal-minority assertion.

Comparing those two userbases doesn't make much sense to me.

I think it's really you who is making the extraordinary claim here and you should be providing the evidence. Signal's goal, as has been repeated many times in these threads is to replace SMS and other less-secure forms of messaging for as many users as possible, not to cater to somewhat off-the-beaten-path concerns over phone numbers. They are aiming for users of messaging. And they are making the very reasonable inference that most of those users are not hung up on identifying themselves with a phone number.

Additionally, if Signal's current users cared about the phone number thing that much, they wouldn't be using Signal to begin with. Where's your survey data that says Signal users just can't stand the phone-number-as-id thing?

What I was trying to convey is that I would expect people who don't understand or care enough about their personal privacy would use more popular and mainstream messengers. Whether people who care about privacy consider phone numbers private or not is something we need data to determine.

> Where's your survey data that says Signal users just can't stand the phone-number-as-id thing?

That's exactly what I'm asking for. At this point, we're both speculating. None of us can make solid claims about either userbase without providing evidence. tptacek most certainly can't claim " a small but vocal minority of Signal's user base wants non-phone-number identification" without providing evidence either, which is the original objection that started this thread.

Don't expect people to take your reason for dismissing their concerns seriously when you base it on your personal perception or beliefs in stead of facts, and don't make unsubstantiated claims to discredit their concerns.

But they ‘know’ the phone number is a non starter because that’s how other social networks outed them. So they will also often end up using a string of bad tools as an awkward way to keep several worlds separate.

Most won’t admit it, but this second reason is why they, as iPhone users, aren’t in encrypted Messages for those chats. Neither end wants the chats in their phone number world.

While you can argue this use case is for hiding that one even participates in chats others might frown on, that to me sounds like a use case that matters, since today, most of the world doesn’t agree what should be frowned upon.

// This is not a technical assessment, it’s from the non-technical users’ point of view, how they think it’s working or not working. Same folks assume phone number is more identifying than finding an app that doesn’t need phone number because it can accept their FB log in. It’s a pretty rough world for non-techies.

Yes, it is some, but it's not a ton.