this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
243 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37602 readers
435 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
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Signal is publicly testing letting users add usernames to their accounts so they don’t have to share their phone number to connect via the encrypted messaging service.The test was announced via a post on the Signal forums by VP of engineering Jim O’Leary, who referred to the feature as “pre-beta” and warned that there’ll be rough edges including crashes and broken push notifications.
Although accounts will still be associated with a traditional mobile number at setup, the username feature means you’ll be able to connect with and message other users without having to share what can be an important personally identifiable piece of information.
PCMag points to a note in the service’s wiki mentioning that signs of the feature cropped up as early as 2019, and Whittaker has been open about the Signal’s plans for it.
There are indicators that competitor WhatsApp is working on a similar feature, though the Meta-owned messaging service is typically less open about its future development plans.
But the ease of installing these test clients varies, and you’ll only be able to talk to other users running similar pre-release software.
Saved 50% of original text.