[lxgr]

That's pseudonymity, not anonymity.

Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones).

And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.

[sneak]

You don’t need to acquire a phone number from the country you’re in. Any phone number works on Signal. There’s no long distance.

In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number.

My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods.

It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.

[lxgr]

> In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number that works fine on Signal.

How? And even if that's feasible (for many people I'd argue it's too big a hurdle) it still only gets you pseudonymity.

There are some interesting encrypted messaging ideas floating around that allow you to have per-contact or even per-conversation keys or multiple identities for different contexts; Signal is just not doing much in that regard.

[sneak]

It is completely anonymous, there is no link from the telephone number used to register to the person using it.

[lxgr]

Yes, but you only have one number/identifier that links you across all contexts. That’s a pseudonym, which is a different thing from being anonymous.

You’d need multiple phones and a phone number per context to be actually anonymous. That’s just not practicable for many people, I’d say.