One could argue that you don’t become a trillion dollar company by leaving money on the table.

The way I see it is, we don’t always want anonymity. Sometimes privacy is enough and this is where Signal shine.

Because being tight is considered a beauty standard for women, not so much for men. For men this is mostly upper body muscle (shoulder, arms). A vest top would he an equivalent, and you don’t see skinny guys wearing that either.

I don’t think any of the algorithm is expose to other instances so that wouldn’t impact the communication between instances. At the end of the day this is open source so admins can freely build a forked version of Lemmy with a slightly different algorithm.

There might be things Meta isn’t allowed to do with WhatsApp. Also the concept of account is bit blurry on WhatsApp because you basically login with your phone number and an SMS code sent to your device. This wouldn’t work as well for a service that can be used elsewhere.

In my opinion, Signal isn’t trying to be a Matrix alternative. Anonymity between users isn’t their objective, they mostly want to be a none profit alternative to WhatsApp, Messenger, etc… with strong E2E encryption. Phone numbers is ultimately the best way to discover new users as soon as you install the app.

I’m fine about ads on Signal. It is a none profit. 😉

This is impossible to know. It is more important to see what Lemmy is getting more so than what Reddit is loosing. At least on the fediverse the number is realistic and not something for the shareholders.