Same in a few other European countries. I'm doing it right now with a few SIMs. You can also go on holiday to another country, get a few temporary SIMs there for a few quid and fly back home with the "contraband". Really not hard.
What are the "popular" alternatives? Telegram stores everything, WhatsApp doesn't allow usernames, Matrix requires IPs too...
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.
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