this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
229 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37717 readers
431 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
About time! Hopefully they will find ways to reduce spam though.
Never had a spam message
I imagine unrestricted usernames would make spam easier than with phone numbers. I'm just hoping they have a way to control this.
You still need a phone number to sign up, so there shouldn't be any increase in spam
SimpleX has no phone number but I get no spam because only people I send a one-time invite code to can contact me. There is no directory of usernames.
Makes sense!
they're going with numbers along with usernames, kinda like discord to reduce spam. I hope they work.
Where are you receiving these spam messages from? Random numbers aimed at marketing or what?
Sorry I misframed it. I mean that since there's no need to reveal phone numbers, there could be an opportunity for spammers to increase spam by creating many accounts, and Signal should preemptively find ways where such spams could be reduced. However, I realized after posting that the article says we still need to sign up to signal with a phone number. However, there's still the risk of impersonation (by writing someones username with tiny changes) and people trying to add vulnerable users by username (which they might be using on other platforms) instead of phone number.
Probably possible yeah, but if the account gets flagged after users reporting it, they'll need to get a new number afterwards, which isn't that easy (at least where I live).