alt Hacker NewsSession is shutting down in 90 days
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Session was Australian based which means they would have to do all sorts of horrible things when asked by the government, such as even letting police impersonate users...
I just checked and they claim to have moved their infra to Switzerland.
There are many other issues, some I've forgotten about since I would never trust it in the first place. They also require a phone number even!
Seeing them go, I feel neutral. It's always good to have more anonymity software, just not this for me.
That’s not really a big deal since the session encryption was insecure anyway. It feels almost like a honeypot after they've removed forward secrecy. If you’re looking for a decentralized alternative SimpleX Chat is a more secure option.
Not sure why it's always a binary: either give us $1M or we shut down.
Vast majority of products and services can continue on or near zero, with slow or zero velocity.
Really, you can't fire half the team if you have to and keep operating?
1.75M MAU requires very small infrastructure.
My advice: If you want people to give you money so that you don’t have to shut down, and you’re writing a ten paragraph plea for donations, consider using one of those paragraphs to tell people what your thing is.
If we knew what it was, we might want to help.
If it were actually decentralised, it wouldn't really have huge costs to worry about...
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Why not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.
Surprised to hear this since my understanding was that Session was run on a crypto coin based, user hosted onion routing servers. Do they mean the dev company behind Session is shutting down?
An anecdote I have: a friend once had narcotics shipped intl. through Session a few years ago.
They don’t say how they plan to avoid a repeat scenario a few months down the line.
Donations are fine, but something needs to change or people are just propping up a non-viable business.
Never heard of them, and this page doesn't tell me what they do, but I've laughed at this line
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Not really, there's basically a single sub-market in the US market where that is the norm.
I had never heard of this, why session over signal?
Edit: here is a snippet from google AI:
Signal is a secure, user-friendly WhatsApp alternative requiring a phone number, while Session prioritizes maximum anonymity with no phone number, onion routing, and a decentralized network> 65000 USD in donations > enough for infrastructure for the next 90 days
20k per month in infrastructure. Excuse me, what?
It's sad but I'll forever remember them for having the best tagline ever on their frontpage:
"Send messages, not metadata"
Project(s) whom, moreover, have often weird shills that, if you squint your eyes just a little bit, suddenly look like xxxINT moles.
So if only for that tagline, thanks a huge lot: metadata are more important than the content of the messages themselves and you have no privacy if your phone number and contacts are known.
This is extortion.
They're hoping one of the rich dark web drug lords that use the app will sponsor them with crypto.
> To date, the STF has received approximately $65,000 in donations. This is enough to maintain critical Session infrastructure for the next 90 days.
Excuse me, what?! Spending $22k a month in infra as a pre-money startup is insane.
I'd love to know where the $600k that Vitalik Buterin donated to them 3 short months ago went. I don't think they've adequately addressed this question.
A few months ago, a Session update logged me out. I tried to log back in, but my passphrase caused Session to crash. I tried the Play Store version, the F-Droid version, and the desktop version.
Support told me that login method had been around for a while, and I didn’t know it. So suddenly, I was locked out and couldn’t access MY ACCOUNT. I used to promote Session, but since their support response was basically a big “fuck you,” I say “fuck you too,” and I hope people switch to SimpleX.
I don't personally use it, but regardless, it'd be a shame to see it go
If you need decentralized messaging and not some cryptocoin front, Delta Chat (https://delta.chat/) is what you're looking for.
They should keep a single competent and curious senior developer who can do it all. In this age of AI, you can make do without having a whole team of developers.
I could never get it to work and I've tried several times. I kind of get the feeling I'm being blocked at the ISP level. We entered an era of the Internet where you're just not allowed to create secure communications.
Sad. I will need a new way to communicate with my guy.
I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
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> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year, and on top of this there are legal and operational overheads for running the STF.
Translation:
Our product makes no money, has no use case and we need $1M to survive.
Two ways a PE "cost saver" would fix this:
1. Claude + 1x senior engineer (in India).
2. CTO + Claude and no senior engineers / employees.
Given we have (allegedly) achieved "AGI" (heavily disputed) they don't need as many employees.
Especially those that are after $150k+ which when you can vibe code with Claude for less than $10k anyway. /s
Job done.
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I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan. If you launch a business and you have not done the work to have a business plan, then in 99.999% of situations, your business will fail. A business plan includes market & competitive research, a revenue plan based on that research that includes realistic pricing models and costs, a marketing plan, and several options for when things don't turn out like you planned. This isn't even Business 101, this is like Remedial Intro to Business. If you don't have this worked out before you launch, you have already failed.
The corollary for this is as a user, you should determine whether or not the business you are planning to depend on has a business model before you choose to depend on them. If there is no apparent income stream, then the business will close at some point and you may as well skip all the heartburn and choose not to use that business for anything you care about. BlueSky, I'm looking at you right now.