| There's always going to be tradeoffs when you're dealing with online anonymity. On the far anonymous end you've got 4Chan style anonymity, no permanent or any ID at all. Keeping track of individual people is nearly impossible. Conversations are chaotic and hard to follow. Pretty solid privacy. I guess the next step up would be per conversation/thread/group whatever ID, you trade a small amount of privacy for improved conversation, privacy is still pretty good, a poor choice in username or username reuse could prove to be privacy risks. I guess next up from that would be something like forum style usernames, like hn or reddit where it's persistent across the entire platform, but still doesn't have to be linked to anything permanent or 'real'. It increases the privacy risk again because now, your conversation history can be tracked across time. This does make it easier for more permanent connections to be made between users but does make it easier for sensitive details to be leaked depending on the user's behaviour. Up from there you start getting into IDs that are linked to real world information about a user. This provides some pretty obvious privacy risks. Ids linked to phone numbers are a strange case of trying to take an ephemeral ID that in todays world can change quite regularly and use it as a source of info for an ID based on real world information. |
Connecting consists of exchanging public keys (which can be global per person, or compartmentalized per contact/conversation).
Rather than a central server relating messages to the right peers, there’s a global feed where you attempt to decrypt everything and the ones which succeed are obviously addressed at you.
The benefit here is that not even a central server operator like Signal can trivially tie messages or chat identities to peers.