Joined the Signal username land grab, got the usual handle. Question arises: Best practices on posting/sharing. At the moment you have to know my phone # to Signal me, but that’s very easy to figure out. So, initially inclined to just post the username. Hmmmmmm…
@timbray Using a well known username for #Signal is a recipe for receiving lots of spam. I'll bet that's the main reason why Signal does not currently have much spam. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use my public handle. Signal does well with smaller numbers of people and less active chats. Very active chats or large groups are quite painful in my experience as compared to @element Signal's use case is communicating with people you know, while #Matrix #IRC #Mastodon are for big/active groups
@eighthave @timbray @element
Is it possible to change the handle easily in case of spam usage?
@dreua @eighthave @timbray As explained in another post, you can change it at any time without repercussions, since it's just a pointer to your account.
@dreua it is indeed a nice feature that the connection is separately maintained from the username. I was responding to the discussion about reusing well known public usernames. For all my public code repos, I use "eighthave". I could claim "eighthave" for Signal then lots of people could easily connect with me via Signal. But then anyone could also send me spam or Pegasus. So I think it was a mistake for Signal to call this a "username" it behaves differently, it is more like an invite link
@eighthave not quite. Changing your phone number or email address means that you need to inform everyone you’re already in contact with of the new phone/email. This is not the case when changing your username on Signal. You keep your ongoing chats, group memberships, etc. The only difference is that people won’t be able to start new chats with you using the old username, which exactly the point of changing it.
@eighthave
There seems to be a misunderstanding: The handle is just a *pointer* to your account which allows you to create a *lasting* connection, you can change it any time but *still keep the connections you already have*.
That is very *unlike* changing an email address or phone number where you'd need to re-establish each contact connection. I know this system from telegram and at least that part of telegram works quite good.
Think of this as an invite link that you can invalidate easily.