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Offers the same privacy but is not centralised. it's peer to peer
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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One of the design goals is that they don't have a user database, so governments etc can't knock down their door demanding anything. By using phone numbers your "contacts" are not on their servers but local on your phone.
That's WRONG they have a Database of every Phone number registered to them and metadata like the last time they logged in. You send all your contacts numbers to signal so they can respond who is also using Signal.
But your phone number is, and thus every agency can get your full name and address and location.
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Session is what you want. But you have to directly shares each others public keys to connect
as I see it, Signal tried to fit that privacy gap for a standard centralised messenger, if you think about it, that might have made it easier to non-tech-savvy people to adopt it (even if it was as a request from a contact), decentralisation is not remotely appealing to them
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Signal is not perfect but we control its app, libre software. See SimpleX Chat.
Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.
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It's focused on ensuring there is no middleman between you and the other party, but it does not have a goal to provide anonymous messaging. Sadly.
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If you want to be mainstream a) you can't have spammers, scammers, and all the other scum of the earth and b) finding your contacts in the app HAVE TO be plug and play. Literally no normie will bother adding with usernames or whatever.
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Privacy is not necessarily anonymity. Signal uses a phone number to prevent spam and DDOS attacks on their network. Session doesn't do this and got wrecked by DDOS attacks to the point where most of the major groups are pretty much dead.
Use Signal to talk to people you know. That's what it's for. You don't use it for anonymous chats.