On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
You can use Monero for payment, I started doing this ever since sanctions began. Free services are not really viable because they’re far more likely to have all their numbers already used up.
But yea, the overall point is that it is a large inconvenience and a possible point of failure (the next number user deleting the account).
Yeah, it’s certainly problematic, and I’d very much prefer that it not have that dependency. But I think it’s still worth using Signal despite needing a number, because it’s a really low barrier to getting new users on it.
If you want something truly private w/o the dependency on a number, there are better options, such as SimpleX. However, the barrier to entry there is a bit higher.
I have a few problems with Simplex (I worry about it being effectively centralized for now and that the VC funding may get it to either enshittify or stop development)… But I do use it quite a bit and even have the servers (which were very easy to set up and don’t consume a lot of resources). I like a lot of what it does (including being very easy to use), and hope it succeeds as it matures!