Signal is working on a way to sign up without a phone number. The feature has not yet been officially confirmed, and it is not yet known whether it will be available to all users or in what form.
It’s not entirely dystopian (just barely), we have newer messengers like SimpleX and DeltaChat (I/we use Delta) on the up and coming which deliver on all the same e2ee promises as Signal. It’s just network effects as usual, getting people to try is the real hurdle.
What they share in common (mostly) is the architecture - they’re built natively decentralized, utilizing caching relays with no single source of truth, or device of truth, to be used to create a profile of you like a phone number does. Encryption keys owned by the user and no single servers. Generally this is the Nostr design as well, so we have 3 different teams all focusing on the same natively decentralized architecture patterns.
At this point, if it’s on a phone app, it probably doesn’t matter. They have your number.
It’s not entirely dystopian (just barely), we have newer messengers like SimpleX and DeltaChat (I/we use Delta) on the up and coming which deliver on all the same e2ee promises as Signal. It’s just network effects as usual, getting people to try is the real hurdle.
What they share in common (mostly) is the architecture - they’re built natively decentralized, utilizing caching relays with no single source of truth, or device of truth, to be used to create a profile of you like a phone number does. Encryption keys owned by the user and no single servers. Generally this is the Nostr design as well, so we have 3 different teams all focusing on the same natively decentralized architecture patterns.
Is any of these apps good for phone calls or video calls, or just text messages?
At this rate Canada would probably ban anything they can’t get records from eventually if it got popular enough. I hate this timeline.
I started self-hosting xmpp recently, and the calls work perfectly! You don’t need to self-host either, there are plenty of public servers.
Arcane chat (a delta chat client) offers video/audio calls as well