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.
Note: I can not find any separate blog or mastodon post with this same text. This is a link directly to project’s donate page. There is no new snapshot on archive.org yet.
In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Uh… That sounds like a US thing, honestly. Which developers in Europe or Asia earn that kind of money?
Asia? That salary? Dream on
Exactly! 150k is definitely not normal, not even in Europe.
Sounds like bad planning. There are like 3 other e2ee messengers that are open source and have enough funding to operate for years without doing appeal-to-emotion dona-… extortion campaigns
Look at the amount that Signal spends.
Their top 6 earners all get more than half a million per year and all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Google servers so it’s not really “signal” that’s expensive.
Well, when talking about server costs, Threema somehow has been running on a 5€ lifetime license and business customer subscribtions for over a decade.
While briar and simplex are peer to peer and have nearly no ops costs.
Sure, it can be made to be very expensive, but I’m arguing that doing so is a business/design decision.
Servers can help improve the UX, but are expensive. Threema for example, only stores media on their servers temporarely, so they have way lower storage cost with a small tradeoff in userfriendlyness (of having to migratethe old media files you want to keep when you get a new phone). And so on.
If your nonprofit only has 65k, don’t hire multiple devs and provide nice-to-have features that lead to high ops expenses in servers and storage. It’s called minimal viable prpduct for a reason.
For those who, like myself, have never heard of Session prior to now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_(software)
Session is an Australian, currently Switzerland-based, cross-platform end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application emphasizing user confidentiality and anonymity. Developed and maintained by the non-profit The Session Technology Foundation,[3] it employs a blockchain-based decentralized network for transmission. Users can send one-to-one and group messages, including various media types such as files, voice notes, images, and videos.[4]
Session provides applications for various platforms, such as macOS, Windows, and Linux, along with mobile clients available on both iOS and Android.
blockchain
Ok I still don’t know what this program does that’s interesting, but it sounds like another thing we don’t need.
Without looking at the protocol at all, I generally think that blockchain stuff is a solution in search of a problem, but distributed storage might be used to make the system resistant to traffic analysis, the way Hyphanet does.
looks at GitHub repo
Session Router (formerly Lokinet) is an onion routing IP network built on Session Service Nodes
If it’s doing onion routing, then it probably is intended to be resistant to traffic analysis.
Yes?
Should’ve quoted it right away, but the parent comment quotes
it employs a blockchain-based decentralized network for transmission.
Another reason why centralised communication is a bad idea.
Session is decentralized.
Then it should be fine even without the org?
Edit: It will not be fine without the org, so the “decentralized” claim is a bit of a stretch. From their FAQ:
[…] the lack of funding would mean the foundation is not able to support Session in any capacity and will need to be shut down. As a result, Session would be removed from the app stores, and critical infrastructure like the Session file server, push notification server and seed nodes will go offline.
This is unfortunate, even though I don’t use it for messaging (because normies won’t switch, small violin playing) I really like app UX. I’m wondering did they burn their budget on infrastructure or salaries. I suspect infrastructure because crypto but would be interesting to see some financial reports
65.000$ for 90 days ?!
I could run my servers for decades with this kind of money…
How many thousand users does your server have?
It’s probably also for development. Or they are cooling it with water straight from a mountain source and have goldplated wires everywhere. Who knows.
60 cents per user per year is huge. Not sure why they have such costs but it’s not sustainable
Where did you get to that 60 cents number? They mention they need 65k for 90 days of critical infrastructure so I calculate:
65000 / 90 * 365 = 263611,11 euro per year for critical infrastructure
263611,11 / 1700000 claimed users = 0,155 euro per user per year
15,5 cents per user per year is still huge though, compared to delta chat’s 0,1 cent per user per year. (which should be comparable since they are both encrypted decentralized messengers)