[tialaramex]

> from a privacy perspective I have no reason to be made aware of the fact that one of my old bosses who's number is in my phone is on Signal and neither should they know that I am on Signal for the same reasons (or lack thereof).

Your goal is to set up little fun secret decoder ring groups each silo'd with a handful of people so you can pretend to be spies or whatever. For this goal it's important that each silo you set up doesn't know about the others. Signal just wants to end-to-end encrypt all the messages sent between all phones. These goals conflict, and, frankly I think your goal is stupid and should lose.

[davidhyde]

People use Signal in the first place because they want something more secure and privacy focused than the alternatives. It's not reasonable to mock them for having higher expectations of privacy and security than you do. Its the whole point of the product.

[tialaramex]

People who actually want "secure and privacy focused" text messages would want their messages to or from their boss to be "secure and privacy focused" too. Whereas people who just want to create yet another little clique don't want that. They'd rather most messages remained unencrypted, insecure, not privacy focused at all, so long as they can underscore how cool they are by creating an "in" group of people with secure messages.

The _whole point of the product_ - to repeat your phrase - is to secure _all_ the messages rather than repeat the mistake of tools like PGP that never get there.