[Jkvngt]

Normal people have no issues creating user handles on Reddit and Discord and Twitter. Again, the only reason to require a phone number is because Rosenfeld wants it.

[detaro]

No, because using phone numbers gives you contact discovery through the phone book "for free" (with further privacy implications Signal has discussed at length). And an entire argument around it providing a social graph independent of service infrastructure that is important for some aspects of user freedom - again something that has been discussed publicly at length, both from Moxie and from other players in the wider messenger ecosystem (many of which at least partially disagree and have made different tradeoffs - but generally acknowledge the tradeoff exists).