Session messenger app is shutting down
Session team announced on their "Donation" page that the app is to be shutdown in 90 days.
https://getsession.org/donate (archive)
They claim to have received $65,000 total in donations, however this doesn't seem to be an accurate number considering Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum - has donated nearly $400k alone a few months ago.
Some of my earlier thoughts on the whole communicator, and particularly it's management who was known to waste crazy amounts of money on essentially nothing. Not to mention that the people behind session ran at least 2 crypto currencies, which they pre-mined and sold to early investors for millions.
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/comment/171414/#Comment_171414
Comments
Sounds more like a fundraising tactic than a shutdown notice.
I do not think anyone will donate to keep it going, people on X aren't happy about lack of transparency about donation from Vitalik, and a multitude of other things.
Happy to be proven wrong though. They would need to continue receiving $100k+ per month to keep it afloat, it's how much they burn through.
Reminds me of the Wikipedia donation prompts
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
I don't think I'm much mistaken in stating that nobody has even heard of this one before.
Secondly, they purport the lack of paid developers as a tragedy, meanwhile that is exactly how 90% of FOSS projects successfully operate for years. If this thing is anything worthwhile, volunteers will come around to keep it afloat.
Assuming there's any justification at all for yet another messenger, when there's already Matrix, Delta.Chat, etc. I hear that even XMPP these days is not what it used to be, and actually much more usable.
Literally who?
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
It was mentioned here before, and I linked my comment in the initial post.
You are not the target for this application, also Matrix nor Delta.chat offers the privacy Session did. It runs on a decentralized network, and everything is onion routed(somewhat similar to Tor routing).
It also is very simple to use, and provides reasonably good opsec out of the box. It started as a Signal fork, without the need for phone numbers and without the central point of failure/moderation.
It's very popular in cybercrime and drug communities for that reason. Probably the closest competitor atm is SimpleX.
Are you saying it is popular with criminals?
Yes. It was not always like that, but a lot of them migrated with the shutdown of consumer version of Wickr. Surprisingly a lot of them trusted that application, despite being owned by Amazon (2021 onward), serving military & LE and being closed source.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/amazon-wickr-app-shutting-down/
In the beginning it was just privacy nerds, it was back when I used it. Then it gained popularity in the "troublesome" communities.
Wickr was a rabbithole of its own, much like Kik.
I do not think that an application being popular with criminals should be a secret, it could serve as a good indication of it's privacy and security features, because these people trust it with their own freedom or life.
Well, some criminals trusted Anom and were arrested. But I think it was carefully marketed only within "troublesome" communities back then?
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Anom was a lot different, it wasn't promoted to "normies" at all. It was run by feds day one, with the help of a developer who was working on something similar but got caught. They also distributed it to gang affiliated people, to spread it further down the organized crime orgs.
And of course, it was not open source, and more complex than just a messenger.