[lxgr]

As far as I can tell, "limit" will soon mean "disable". They just can't flip that switch yet given that legacy clients will not know what to do about "numberless contacts".

> do not get my phone number period

I'd also like that, but they apparently use phone numbers as a primary key for account recovery and identification (e.g. on a new device without the old one present), so that's probably very hard to change architecturally.

There are some interesting concepts of "identityless messengers", but this is inherently hard to do on mobile – at least the platform operator will always know which identities are clustered together on a given device if you want efficient push notification delivery over APNs/FCM.

[nottorp]

> There are some interesting concepts of "identityless messengers"

Like... icq... yahoo messenger... old skype... ?

And even some modern mobile chat apps i think.

[lxgr]

These definitely all had a stable identity (ICQ number etc.)

What I mean is having an ad-hoc identifier per contact/group chat which doesn’t allow your various contacts to correlate that you are the same person.