[3np]

Also worth explicitly mentioning SSB-style cryptographic “implicit identity”.

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.

[hnaccount_rng]

I guess this gives you privacy (for the price of 7e9x-ing your compute/bandwidth effort), but only until you loose control of the private key. Then you get deanonymised completely, don't you?