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Session is shutting down in 90 days
whynotlearn
Member
Our Final Appeal:
Session is shutting down in 90 days
We had hoped this day would never come, but Session has now entered its final 90 days of operation. If we are unable to reach our funding goal within this period, the Session Technology Foundation (STF) will be forced to shut down.
To date, the STF has received approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days. We are extremely grateful for the support Session has received from the community, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to retain full-time developers. As a result, all paid staff and developers will have their final working day on April 9, 2026. After this date, some team members will continue on a primarily volunteer basis to help maintain Session until July 8, 2026.
This is our final appeal to the Session community: without your support, the STF will cease all operations on July 8, 2026.
Comments
(Note, my personal opinion on the situation right now: They had a coin and everything and from my understanding they are asking for a million dollars to run the infrastructure and this problem will occur every single year which sounds a bit suspicious as to them doing this all or nothing, and still its worth a discussion especially the situation about a decentralized chat app shutting down. Not discincentivizing anyone to not donate I suppose but I like the work done at unredacted.org and maybe a little simplex but mostly unredacted.org)
It’s always "attractive" to donate when your contribution goes toward paying the “developers” behind the service a $150,000/year salary.
Especially when this isn’t their primary income.
never even heard of it. odd naming btw, nothing about "session" says chat app to me.
It is natural to decay and perish what is not needed.
I have nothing against developers having high wages, but in this case I fail to see how this expense is justified
Also I think that they are coupling up the infrastructure costs inside with these developer costs.
My interpretation (which I can be wrong I suppose) but was that, they are somehow trying to convey it takes 1 million dollar to run the infrastructure to general public.
When the infrastructure itself doesn't cost so much, thus showing it on LET, I think that many hosts here themselves could host something like session for like a fraction of a fraction of this 1 million dollars.
Their biggest mistake was to introduce their own token
Isn't Session's selling point a decentralisation? What infrastructure, especially that expensive, do they need?
Hmm, kind of strange that a decentralized app requires such an expensive infrastructure, they estimate yearly running costs to be $1 million, that's pretty massive.
If you want truly decentralized chat app, our collaborator built this:
https://ownly.work
I know right @tentor ? Thus the irony that they are shutting down
I remember talking to the founder of simplex sometime long ago and I think that they told me that the way session works is that you have to ask them for permission (ie. get their crypto or something) to get the nodes working and then these infra guys got some token back or something (I am a bit unclear)
So when they are saying shut down it feels to me that they are gonna shut down all their nodes and any incentives for others to shut down to and maybe even perhaps just maybe do it too.
This own token concept is adopted by many projects, even SimpleX now.
So in the last 18 months they have received 90 days worth of donations, they have not spent any of it yet but now they will?
This is all very fishy. Session itself is fishy.
They host an unlimited amount of media files on a single central server, just like Telegram does. This probably has something to do with their costs.
You are lucky. It's popular in - let's just say - some shady parts of the internet. There is nothing good about it. SimpleX has better anonymity, anyway. Did you know Session uses its own copy of Tor?
People don't care about privacy
I am not the biggest fan of simpleX themselves, I mean they are running things on hetzner boxes to be honest so firstly I believe that they are just some simple strikes away from being taken down.
But for some anonymous things where I don't want to make account each time to keep my identity private, they are good I guess.
I also looked at the protocol of SimpleX and atleast the group settings is definitely a big trust-me bro moment because you can have contacts talking to each other in a group that you can be part of and you wouldn't even somehow know that.
What they shine in from the words of simpleX creator themselves from my chat with them once or twice is in one-to-one communication and I guess even in that, their stance on IP address protection say with tor etc. is a bit concerning maybe for some/many.
To be honest, sometimes I get tired of all of this stuff and I just love signal/matrix in that regards. Matrix has some metadata leakage I guess though but overall pretty good.
Founders’ winter meetings in Switzerland aren’t cheap, especially if they’re in Verbier and involve après-ski.
(I miss some transparency about what they are actually using the money for)
Fun fact but I think was it vitalik or someone who donated them 300k dollars just a few months back and there isn't tooo much transparency about the way that they act (from my understanding)
Wikipedia apparently costs around $3 million in hosting (but another $170 million wasted spent on other stuff).
EDIT: just realised my comment could be interpreted as meaning $1 million is plausible, but it was meant the opposite way...
Was Loki Coin, then Oxen Coin, then Session. Some VC funded Australian based startup I believe. Was the Loki network for a while. I still probably have a .loki domain and it's keys saved somewhere, probably some Oxen, too. They've been at it for years.
At one point it all seemed promising, but they've blown through a lot of money over the years.
Tor and I2P work fine and Signal is the only messenger I'd contribute to (and I do, monthly recurring donations to signal)
I liked the idea of Session, but it always just felt like a better UI/UX version of tox chat.
I also just use Signal, works without extra thought. Tox is great if you like decentralized.
Is there any other messenger providing anonymity and privacy comparable to Session?
I don't think so, which is a shame.
I use SimpleX Chat. But the market is saturated and it's hard to get people install yet another messenger.
Yeah that’s rough privacy tools always get tons of praise but way fewer people actually step up to fund them when it matters
Pardon my ignorance on this topic, but wouldn't Signal be comparable? It's not decentralised though the metadata it keeps/knows is really minimal.
Not at all, because Signal does not offer anonymity.
I guess you could register with a VoIP, other users don't HAVE to know your phone number you can use usernames.
The phone number is the only requirement AFAIK, other data you can just "make it up".
Not saying that you are entirely wrong given Signal does ask for a phone number, but there are ways to rent a phone number online anonymously.
So I guess it is possible but yes, Signal is immensely private, that's for sure and privacy != anonymity.
Hey Matthew offtopic but long time no see man, hope you are doing fine.
How is the turkey expansion going for loclix? and you had also mentioned India when you had asked me about it and I suggested India so are you expanding into India and what are your plans mate. Good to see you in sometime now, where had you gone xD?
Welp, I had forgotten my LET password /s.
Just been busy with work, India is probably a no-go for the time being just because I don't see demand there. As for Turkey, things are moving but slowed down because we were originally going to sign up with PenDC - but after everything that happened just recently I had to dust off some old DC contacts in Istanbul.
That's all solved anyway so we're moving forwards and it should come online very soon (within end of summer)
Also I'm still recovering from Easter and Easter Monday lunch so please go easy on me.
They are not comparable. Session is anonymous by design, Signal is the opposite.
It is not only the phone number, but the network design, everything... of course an expert can use any messenger anonymously, but Session provides a high degree of anonymity for the average user, and Signal is not anonymous.