Spain has banned Telegram.
They are claiming this is over copyright violations of users, that Telegram is failing to police. Now some users will be forced to consider decentralized solutions. As I have repeated many times, Session messenger empowers users to defy state level censorship, with its unique blockchain based DNS that completely separates physical locations from identity. And our team has repeatedly mentioned using Session to defy a Monero ban.
With Session, if the location of the VPS or device is discovered, the user can rotate the blockchain name to a new public key. On the other hand, SimpleX, Tor Onions, or XMPP are tied to physical devices with encryption keys in memory, and their discovery is a game-over.
However, Session receives a lot of criticism. Rather than ignore this, I tackle it head on, https://simplifiedprivacy.com/spain-has-banned-telegram-defending-session/
Tor Browser Onion: http://privacypkybrxebcjicfhgwsb3coatqechwnc5xow4udxwa6jemylmyd.onion/spain-has-banned-telegram-defending-session/
If you communicate with someone on another server, wouldn't your data and metadata be exposed to that server too?
Yes, the other server can see who you are talking to, but you can encrypt the conversation so they cannot see the content.
Not that telegram or others are any better (except maybe SimpleX), but imo this is a significant privacy weak point. But I understand it is pretty difficult to get away from this.
I disagree that metadata is meaningless even if you use multiple identities with VPN. But I agree this greatly enhances your security. A state actor could potentially still find you out though, with enough effort.