> What's wrong with meeting in real life I regularly DM people I haven't seen in person in years. I'm not going to fly cross-country to bootstrap a communicati

> What's wrong with meeting in real life I regularly DM people I haven't seen in person in years. I'm not going to fly cross-country to bootstrap a communication channel. > or exchanging account names in whatever way you initially exchanged phone numbers? Well because I exchanged phone numbers irl 7 years ago. I do not have a time machine. > You don't seem concerned over the security problem of account activation codes being sent over SMS, so I don't see why you should be concerned over exchanging anonymous account names in the same or more secure ways. Correct, because the bit of information "I have a signal account" is far less revealing than the bit of information "I have shared my signal account with a particular individual". You avoid that only with some kind of public attestation of your signal identity (in keybase or on twitter or whatever) which is the best option, but generally requires everyone have a known public index of their forms of contact, which my friends from high school, generally speaking, don't.