But there are plenty of other services that don't require a phone number that also seem to mitigate that issue, so while it may be a convenient option, it's hardly the only option.

Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else's computer w/o having to install something.

I don't know what direction they're going, but I'm honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.

Sure, and I think that would send a message to all of your contacts that a new account is using that number, but I'm honestly not sure. If you have an active account (i.e. on a desktop or something), I think you can just change your number if that happens (i.e. get another temp number).

It's certainly more convenient if you use a longer-term number, but I think it's feasible with a throwaway number. Once your account is set up, Signal doesn't need your number for anything if you disable publishing that.

You need to enter your Signal Pin, otherwise you will get removed from all groups etc

Hmm, I guess then you'd need to get a VPN that works in your country (not sure how hard that is in Iran) and find a VOIP service that either doesn't require any payment, or accepts payments from Iran.

It's certainly not ideal, and I wish they'd eliminate the dependency on phone numbers, but until then, there are options for most people to create an account w/o having a permanent number.

Are you suggesting you need a phone number to get a phone number from Google Fi?

And yeah, it'll definitely to KYC, because that's a federal regulation. My point is that you don't need the number long-term, so the number will only be associated with you for like a week while the trial period lasts. So sign up for Google Fi trial, create a Signal account, then cancel the trial. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

But putting a phone number in immediately exposes protesters to association. Sure, Signal can't give out the contents of messages, but it still has the chain of contact. So if a government gets hold of this record, legally or otherwise, now you have everyone associated to a suspect phone number/person and can start rounding them up.

It's the complete antithesis of freedom of association when there's a record of everyone that you've contacted. The contents don't enter into that problem, and I can't see why they feel the need to keep this as part of their system. It purposely makes it impossible to use this for something like peaceful protest. So, no, it doesn't give you privacy from governments, because governments that don't respect freedom of association will use that information to punish dissidents.

I can't imagine any reason to use phone numbers except to purposefully keep this chain of association for governments to use. Even Facebook doesn't require this sort of personal proof, and it's suspicious as hell.