[nabaraz]

Most of the use-cases for requiring a phone number to sign up for a service e.g. Twitter, Signal seems to be to avoid spam. Atleast allegedly!

What alternatives can be used instead, something that is easily accessible/available to the general public but not easy to obtain to create mass users?

[jonasdoesthings]

Instead of heavily limiting account creation, Discord for example limits the possibility to message users outside of your network by default. Only people you have added as friend or you share a server with are allowed to message you by default.

For signal that would be harder to implement since it's more focused on 1o1 chats instead of groups, maybe if spam gets out of hand they could use a grey-listing approach like Instagram does where users outside your network get moved to the "message requests" inbox by default.

[celdon25]

Discord, while overall better than Telegram for privacy, will flag your ip / device / identity and require a phone number for new accounts if you do something like use a message archiver to back up conversations. Took me years to get the block removed (but not for my work account). It was a privacy nightmare for me and when I had to get an account for work I had to sign up for an additional cell phone service, which cost me thousands to this day.

I’m still nervous about making new accounts in case it triggers some process to lock me out of my one account that I don’t have a phone number for. I couldn’t join the baldurs gate 3 discord to find people to play the game with because it required a phone number on the account, which I was already forced to use for my work account.

On the other hand, I’m glad they actually do enforce their rules, unlike Telegram (which is a haven for scammers, pedos, radical communists, open market drug dealers, and terrorists, not to mention the soul-depleting interactions I’ve had overall with chat rooms there)

[nurumaik]

>Discord, while overall better than Telegram for privacy

Sorry, what?

[celdon25]

Discord isn’t great, but hear me out here.

Telegram can’t be trusted to not broadcast your pseudonym to whatever work or other contacts you might have saved on your phone.

Telegram doesn’t allow for changing one’s name per group chat like Discord does, so if you want to be known by a certain name only in a certain place, you need another account, which means you need another phone number. That’s not privacy.

As far as message contents go, people can click two buttons to export the entire chat. Or even delete the entire history. Then they’ll have the history and you won’t, and malicious actors (which are everywhere on Telegram) will be able to take your words out of context and use them against you. That’s not privacy.

On Discord at least you have some protections against that by having hoops to jump through to export messages (risking account ban or account creation limitation), helping keep people honest. The account age is also visible in plain sight, and that is very much a data point that people use to ward off potential bad actors.

Another dimension of privacy is I might want to read a message without knowing the sender read it. You may or may not care about that.

If you want to sell drugs and remain private, Telegram might be less likely to report you to the government.

Privacy is not about what features your app might have, it’s about what the user ultimately experiences, and the specific risks they take. The threat model suited for the average person is much more unfavorable on Telegram than on Discord.

It’s more complicated of a situation than being able to say “we can do end to end encryption”.

[nurumaik]

> Telegram can’t be trusted to not broadcast your pseudonym to whatever work or other contacts you might have saved on your phone.

Disable contact sync, you don't need it for telegram to work

> Another dimension of privacy is I might want to read a message without knowing the sender read it. You may or may not care about that.

Long press on chat

> Then they’ll have the history and you won’t

You have a button to "nuke" chat for both of you from server. Then they'll have no proof except their words that "I didn't make this up, I honestly exported chat". Honestly, I don't really get this point. Can you elaborate a bit? What is the problem with exporting?

> If you want to sell drugs and remain private, Telegram might be less likely to report you to the government.

And with telegram you can register anonymous "number" on blockchain via tor and don't even care about telegram reporting you to the government. Is this intended to be bad point for telegram?

> threat model suited for the average person is much more unfavorable on Telegram than on Discord

Discord have TOS that allows it to read your private chats and ban you for privately discussing things that are against their code of conduct. This makes any sentence with words "discord" and "private" a complete joke. It's non-private messenger that never even pretended to be private. Maybe somewhat private if your main threat are random internet trolls