“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
It really depends on your needs and what people you communicate with are willing to use. A few platforms that are notable in no particular order.
SimpleX Chat is probably the gold standard right now. It uses absolutely no user IDs such as phone numbers, no usernames, no random strings of text. Instead, it creates unique, pairwise decentralized message queues for every single contact you have. Because there is no global identity, there is no metadata connecting your conversations together.
Session is a popular Signal alternative. It doesn’t require a phone number and routes your messages through an onion-routed decentralized network that’s similar to Tor. Since your IP address is hidden and messages are bounced through multiple nodes, no single server ever knows who is talking to whom, stripping away metadata.
Jami is completely decentralized, open-source platform. It uses Distributed Hash Tables to connect users directly to one another without a central server. Notably, it supports high-quality voice and video calls.
heard SimpleX is really good, the only thing that bothers me is their vc funding model. It makes me feel a bit suspicious.
Session is a security downgrade. It doesnt support forward secrecy which is hella important.
Session actually does implement a form of forward secrecy through the Session Protocol. https://getsession.org/blog/session-protocol-v2