That's good to know for sure, thanks. That basically leaves only one more concern: the anonymity aspect.

On Session, they use onion routing based on nodes run by volunteers who stake the Oxen (soon to be Session Token) cryptocurrency. Meanwhile, on SimpleX, I don't know what maintains the anonymity. It appears to be based on SimpleX's servers, but how does that keep people anonymous? Because, if that is how it works, their servers are inevitably seeing the user's IP bouncing around. Compared to the onion routing, that seems like a relatively weak form of anonymizing users, even without the ID metadata.

Then again, I'm definitely not an expert, so I could be completely misunderstanding how all of this works. I know a lot of people say that SimpleX is more decentralized than any other messenger, but I'm not sure how that is the case if SimpleX themselves are running the servers.

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Session is not very decentralized as Tor because it requires imvesting ~$1000 in a token (which is being replaced soon...) to run a node. Tor nodes can be ran by anyone. Session downgraded their encryption based on incorrect statements: https://getsession.org/blog/session-protocol-explained

Anyone can run the SimpleX servers, there's many other public instances you can use instead. IP address is indeed an identifier, but not part of the messaging protocol itself. You always have to expose your IP address to third parties, it's just your choice who sees it (SimpleX servers, VPN, Tor, etc).

Tor is also fully supported with in-app SOCKS proxy support and effectively kill switch for not connecting directly to non-onion servers, as well as .onion server mirrors. They wrote about it here: https://simplex.chat/blog/20240604-simplex-chat-v5.8-private-message-routing-chat-themes.html

Interesting info, you've given me a lot to read about. Thanks!