Is not Signal inferior? In Telegram you can communicate with strangers without disclosing a phone number, in Western messengers until recently you had to disclose it so that your contacts can conveniently find you and punch you in the face if you are a man or just annoy you with indecent messages if you are a woman (probably not scary in a country where everyone has a gun and every home is a castle, but not all world is like this). What Western genius thought of such a feature, displaying a phone number in a group chat?

Telegram also allows to delete any chat in one click. Telegram has support for HTTP, SOCKS, MTPROTO and WEB proxies to evade censorship, Western messengers do not. Telegram is written in C++. Although it is a piece of proprietary garbage and might be connected to the government, at least it is well made piece.

Also it became difficult to register in Telegram, it often asks for 1 euro when trying to register with a fake number. And with a real number the OTP code simply doesn't get delivered to Russia.

You can pay money to register without a phone number https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/11197884108826-...

Requires Apple or Google Pay, linked to a phone number and a bank card, crypto not accepted.

> What Western genius thought of such a feature, displaying a phone number in a group chat?

Well, most of those apps try to inject themselves in between you and the rest of the world, by "helpfully" offering to be your SMS handler and phone call replacement.

No thanks.

I am not sure what you mean by "Western messengers" exactly. If it's Whatsapp, then I don't think it's any better than Telegram, even though Whatsapp claims to provide E2EE. The entire stack is closed source, and in any case it leaks huge amounts of metadata.

And no, Signal is not inferior. If you are really concerned about the phone number issue, use a burner eSIM or purchase a Signal account. Last time I checked though, payment was tied to Apple/Google, inexplicably.