hiding my phone number is a good privacy and security feature. however, it doesn’t change the fact that signal is a platform intended for personal communication, in some sense reolacing sms. it is my (and in principle, by design, anyone’s) most personal means of communication in terms of what you have in your pocket and how immediately available or contactable you are. it is not feasible to separate very close personal stuff from bug groups of strangers that you might not want to have in the same datastream as your most important communication, since it is not easily possible to have multiple accounts in parallel (you would need multiple phone numbers, meaning multiple sim cards and multiple phones).

i have had many instances where people (sometimes complete strangers) from big groups have contacted me privately. usually well-intentioned, but still, i don’t want to be contacted by strangers on the platform that i intend to be available at all times. and blocking also sucks then. also, when searching contacts in signal, all people from these big groups pop up.

these big group chats, even with notifications off, clutter up my important means of communication. i don’t want stupid meme groups to be interlaced with my personal communication with my loved ones.

sorry for the rant, i think signal sucks for this purpose.