My understanding from what you’re writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That’s all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can’t use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal - just exchange your other “account number” via some other channel.

Besides, don’t think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. “What are you hiding, citizen?” and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The “Give us your phone number or fuck off” sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we’ll do it for them when they’re so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you’re trying to claim you’re more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I’m sure I’m not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

I’m surprised this hasn’t been said yet… but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don’t want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

I also hate the fact that it’s a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it’s clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I’ll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin’s puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider’s service.

I don’t understand why we’ve forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I really wish we’d start seeing government regulation that says “you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service.” I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I’m pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

But regardless, I don’t see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It’s not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn’t federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven’t seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

I’d be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven’t looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it’s supposed to interoperate with different applications.