I saw some threads here about Telegram and piracy stuff being banned. So, as an experimental alternative, I created a public Signal group for piracy.
Maybe it’ll be useful?
Before joining
Signal supports usernames and hiding telephone numbers. Here’s a blog entry on how to do so. You might want to:
- set a username
- change your profile name (these are two separate things!)
- hide your phone number
You might try a Matrix group instead. Doesn’t require a phone number and supports more than 1000 users unlike Signal. Search is bad though unfortunately.
Why not use SimpleX Chat? If you use Matrix for that you will likely get reported and get banned
It still requires a phone number to sign up, but you don’t need to share it to chat with someone
What is even the point of “piracy groups”? What exactly can you find there that you cannot in other places designed for that, e.g., trackers, usenet, forums…?
I don’t know this group but I am on a telegram group that shares movies produced in my country of origin. It’s quite niche, I never saw any tracker that does the same. I doubt it for usenet but never looked into it. Anyway, my point is that some layman uploaders use whatever is at hand and not necessarily have much preparation or technically involved solutions…
Good idea overall, unfortunately they still have your IP and phone number which means Europeans are still implicated
Signal doesn’t collect IPs and therefore can’t even hand them out. It’s been requested in 2021. Here’s a list of requests from authorities they were allowed to publish. I’ve looked through 3 of the most recent and nowhere do they reveal IPs.
Sure they don’t log the IPs, but it is technically impossible to not know the IP when you’re running a centralized service.
What are the “popular” alternatives? Telegram stores everything, WhatsApp doesn’t allow usernames, Matrix requires IPs too…
The phone number is not connected to the messages. That’s the only thing they have. It is the best app for privacy.
Arguable in it being “the best app for privacy”. Can you link to a source which shows that phone numbers are not linked to accounts? (Why do they need them anyway?)
They have published requests from the law enforcement and their responses to these requests. The only unencrypted data they have is the phone number, a date of sign up and a date of the last login. That is it, everything else is encrypted and they cannot access it whatsoever.
SimpleX all the way
Will a simplex group better? Nothing identifiable.
Feel free to make a post about it. Very few will see it here otherwise :)
