[petestream]

I've learned the hard, or at least slow, way that this discussion is mostly futile. All I can say is that a large part of the world doesn't use phone numbers like that anymore. One of the major benefits of messaging services is that they aren't tied to a country, carrier, area, address, personal identity or even your phone. It doesn't end up in random databases of shopping websites or advertising networks. You can share it with someone you briefly met, someone unknown or even have someone else share it for you.

I've found, and I think more than me have, that the overlap between having an immediate need for security and wanting to share you phone number is surprisingly small. And even just a subset of those people are on Signal.

It's just never been very useful for me when other services are.