• Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I imagine unrestricted usernames would make spam easier than with phone numbers. I’m just hoping they have a way to control this.

        • smeg@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          You still need a phone number to sign up, so there shouldn’t be any increase in spam

        • loki@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          they’re going with numbers along with usernames, kinda like discord to reduce spam. I hope they work.

      • Poutinetown@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Sorry I misframed it. I mean that since there’s no need to reveal phone numbers, there could be an opportunity for spammers to increase spam by creating many accounts, and Signal should preemptively find ways where such spams could be reduced. However, I realized after posting that the article says we still need to sign up to signal with a phone number. However, there’s still the risk of impersonation (by writing someones username with tiny changes) and people trying to add vulnerable users by username (which they might be using on other platforms) instead of phone number.

        • rurutheguru@lemmings.world
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          1 year ago

          Probably possible yeah, but if the account gets flagged after users reporting it, they’ll need to get a new number afterwards, which isn’t that easy (at least where I live).