Things got considerably worse in the past years. The process of setting up a standalone desktop version of #Signal got more complicated and is broken even in the development version where it is enabled. There is a pull request to fix this which itself became broken.
Wouldn’t using something like Keybase be better than signal? E2EE chat and a way to verify who you are talking to.
@jeff My experience with Keybase makes me doubt how important security is to them: https://palant.de/2018/09/06/keybase-our-browser-extension-subverts-our-encryption-but-why-should-we-care
I wasn't aware of those issues, and it really is a shame. I like Signal though and wish they would be a little less closed off about their platform. Maybe federate the platform so that it is like TOR and there is not a chain of custody for messages.
Run Signal and press Ctrl-Shift-I to open Developer Tools (it's an Electron app). Switch to Console tab and enter the following command:
getAccountManager().requestSMSVerification("+123456789")
Use your actual phone number instead of +123456789.
If you prefer voice mail verification, use this command instead:
getAccountManager().requestVoiceVerification("+123456789")