Sorry, one person above made the example of the “gaming” buddies, I assumed it was gambling and it was a good use case for an example.

I see anyway, it indeed seems this is not a use-case for signal.

Can you elaborate what would you want to achieve? Are you trying to hide your identity from your interlocutors (e.g., gambling buddies), so that they wouldn’t know you are John Doe?

Well, it depends how you define different “things”. In your example you are talking with people. It doesn’t matter with whom or about what, and the service is a meta-service in this sense. You might not want to use the same email for the gambling site and for your school newsletter, but talking with people - information that says private - using a program that identifies you with a number is not the same thing.

What you said is exactly the point of preventing spam. Having a real identity attached to a signal identity is the point to prevent spam. There is functionally no difference between your multiaccount and a spammer with 6000 accounts.

I can’t imagine using the samw chat account for my online gaming buddies and for my real family!

I can’t really see why, but if that’s the case, signal is not the application for you, I suppose.

would be easy af for a state actor to send u a zero day SMS to take over your phone.

Two problema with this logic

• do you think a state actor needs to leak the phone number from signal to find out your number?
• 0-click SMS exploits are possibile, but extremely rare and extremely expensive. Someone with such an exploit won’t burn it for random Joe.

Edit: In any case, if your security depends on malicious actors not discovering your phone number, a generally public piece of information, your have no security to begin with.

there are a lot of privacy messengers out there that dont use numbers and dont have a spam problem.

Because they have not users either. You are talking about niches in a niche segment of a niche market.

Using a phone number that is used only for account creation is a non-issue overblown by a lot of people. Your phone number is likely in the contact list of tens or hundreds of people, already comfortably associated with your name and conveniently shared with many applications that your contacts use. The association between phone number and identity is something that telco companies can already (and do) provide to authorities. The only bit of metadata that is added is that “person X uses signal” which in itself is an irrelevant piece of data.