Happy to use my real name with friends and family, but would prefer an alias for group chats.

Exactly.

your profile...is also end-to-end encrypted

That's fine if one of those ends isn't a public activism group.

If you don't want your name and profile picture shared with randos, either don't set them

I use Signal to talk to people I actually know, both personally and professionally. I don't want to message them from some sort of unidentifiable alias. And if I did they would know my alias and could disclose it to law enforcement.

or don't chat with randos.

You mean randos like you might find in a public activism group chat? Yes, that was my point, thank you.

Simplex does not give you anymore security. It does however, provide anonymity.

Signal, yes...

Or snikket (xmpp).

Or delta chat (email).

The three are good.

But they must still have your phone number and associate it with your username. So it would still be easy for a government organization to force Signal to give up the identities of all people who join a group.

Simple-X ?
GNU-Jami ?

what's the security issue about simplex??

Wrong. Signal servers don't know of group members.

There is no security issue that I'm aware of.

Really? That's interesting. But the group membership list must be persisted somewhere, no? Otherwise, you wouldn't know where to send and receive messages. So where is it persisted then?

And also, how would you add someone to a group? When you add a new user to a group, would he be able to view all previous messages? Is it possible for this to scale to, say, a thousand or a million users?

My username is my name. As is my profile.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/

I mean, if you're using your name as your username, you can't really complain that Signal doesn't let you be private. That's on you.

They can't get your username from your phone number (but they can b'get your phone number from your username)

1. No, that's not on me. Signal should let me join groups without my username (this is what SimpleX does)

2. The point is not to blame Signal, the point is to highlight that it's not safe to join these activist groups with Signal for this reason, and political action groups should not be using it for this reason, unless you use it exclusively for this purpose, which is also not good, because then it means you're not using it for your personal communications.

Or you could....you know....
NOT use your name as your screen name. That's like buying a hammer and complaining that the nail remover side isn't efficient at removing screws. Well.....yeah. You're not meant to use it that way.

If you actually read my comment before replying to it, I already addressed this. I use Signal in my personal and professional life. I do not want my clients to message me and see my ID as fucking xX_StarLord_69_Xx. Nor my family. It would be very confusing to them. If Signal gave me an option to use multiple profiles (like SimpleX does) I would, but it doesn't.

I wish Signal had an option to create forums. With forum Like ui with threads its easier to organize things and keep up with projects over long periods of time.

And if you read what I said, YOU'RE USING IT FOR THE WRONG PURPOSES!!!