Comment by godelski

  > Admittedly not an amazing user experience to have to share a random string to your friends

And struggle to get adoption. If it's too long, it's hard to share but difficult to brute force even with massive parallelism. But you can always brute force, it is just about how effective brute force is. Entropy is a double edged sword.

It's also harder to then do contact discovery to find who's already in the network. Which is the basic principle of any social network (yes, I'm calling old school landline phones a social network too). It's a tradeoff, right?

And it's worth noting that usernames exist now and this is serving as a bridge. You can provide links and QR codes too. I think this is a fair system and allows my grandma to use signal while still providing a path forward to another paradigm.

This brings me to one of my critiques of signal. I wish they would recognize we all have multiple identities. My real name obviously isn't godelski. But I might want to link my contact here on HN but not reveal to those people that my actual name is "Joe Schmoe". We don't need unlimited identities but having 2 or 3 could really do a lot for privacy. Let me have a little more granularity over my privacy settings. Let me have some people contact me via godelski.## and some by joeschmoe.##. The former sees my name as "godelski" and the latter as "joe".

And to be clear, the phone number issue is privacy related, not security.