What's the point of nicknames then?

> Usernames simply allow you to initiate a connection on Signal without sharing your phone number

> Starting soon, your phone number will no longer be visible to people you chat with on Signal, unless they have it in their phone’s contacts. You will also be able to configure a new privacy setting to limit who can find you by your phone number on Signal. And, you’ll now be able to create an optional username that you can share with the people you want to connect with on Signal.

Lol. Why should they be allowed to associate my phone with my signal handle even then. If i want them to know I'll tell them.

> a new privacy setting to limit who can find you by your phone number on Signal

Double lol. Limit is not disable.

How about an option to "do not give my phone number to anyone, no matter what reason to pass it around you make up this week"?

And the obvious next step: do not get my phone number period. But that has been discussed before.

> do not get my phone number period

I'd also like that, but they apparently use phone numbers as a primary key for account recovery and identification (e.g. on a new device without the old one present), so that's probably very hard to change architecturally.

There are some interesting concepts of "identityless messengers", but this is inherently hard to do on mobile – at least the platform operator will always know which identities are clustered together on a given device if you want efficient push notification delivery over APNs/FCM.

Like... icq... yahoo messenger... old skype... ?

And even some modern mobile chat apps i think.

What I mean is having an ad-hoc identifier per contact/group chat which doesn’t allow your various contacts to correlate that you are the same person.