[thankful69]

If they (Signal) care about privacy, they need to drop the need for phone numbers to use their service, there are many ways of dealing with spam (rate limiting, captchas, ...), a true private/secure messenger app should not require any user identifiable info. And the argument of "Signal was the first e2ee messenger app to go mainstream, so they can keep ignoring user's privacy, .... yada yada..." is naive at best; they should lead by example, right now there are many solutions way more private (Briar, SimpleX, Session, Wickr, ....). I user Signal, and I like it, is just a shame they soft-refuse("We are working on it...") to remove phone numbers from the equation.

[cookiengineer]

I second recommending Briar as a messenger. Codebase is well maintained. Specifications and documents are audited, as well as the official clients.

[timbit42]

Briar is nice but I wish it worked through Tor like Tox does.