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.
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?
In the US, that tracks with a higher-end salary. Call it an impulse thought, but I have a slight feeling that Silicon Valley has something to do with that.
Higher end? You must not have been passing attention to the developer salaries in AI. $150,000 is median developer salary in SF bay area. You really need $100,000 just to support your family here
Higher end is seven figures
I mean, that’s where Silicon Valley is, so yeah.
Senior developers at places like Amazon can easily Make 300+
Depends what field you’re in.
In the gov/defense world 150k+ is a mid career engineer.
Salaries vary by the field and saturation of talent in that field.
The niches still command the riches
That is package right? Most people will not get the full benefit of the package, the cash is usually around 150k, plus the cashable part of the package it would be closer to 200k for most.
Nah.
I know folks making 400+ that are specialists in a niche technology but relatively mainstream position.
They also get stock which raises it to near 500k, then standard bennies.
Tech has crazy money and for desired roles.
I’m in an office of 20somethings pushing 150k+ direct salary plus full benefits and whatnot.
I wouldn’t expect to be paid this in a flyover state though.
Years ago, Netflix was known for paying $400k USD for some senior positions (with no benefits, all cash)
Asia? That salary? Dream on
Exactly! 150k is definitely not normal, not even in Europe.
it’s no really easy to compare both as in often in Europe your salary includes healthcare and other stuff whereas in USA it’s all cash and you have to pay for everything/nothing is included
but still, it looks like a lot even if you remove everything
It’s very easy to compare. In France the average salary for a dev would be 50k. I don’t think my healthcare and retirement costs 100k. The highest you could reach if you’re lucky would be 70/80k but it’s for very specific companies.
Is it really that different between neighboring countries? I’ve seen job listings for 170 in the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Definitely. France is a country where everything is heavily taxed. I don’t remember the percentage but, approximately, when I earn 3k, my employer must pay 3k in taxes on top of it.
The best salary I’ve ever seen for a developer was 70k a year, but it is restricted to companies like Microsoft or IBM.
In any major city in the us its kinda hard to get by with 5 figures nowadays and impossible in the worst cost of living ones. I know that I have to make something like 90k to be in the black in order to have enough after taxes.
Yeah, shudder to think how you would live on $50,000 in SF. That’s definitely three roommates territory
oh yeah but im more thinking having a family and covering all medical costs. One of my biggest problems is im single income with a sick spouse and our country simply does not effectively work for that anymore but its simply a scenario that is always going to exist so either our social safety nets need to get waaaaayyyyyyyyy better or we need to pay waaaaayyyy higher.
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
It’s a scam, they don’t even refund donations if they don’t make the target. Why are their operating costs so high? This is such a red-flag, they need to shutdown regardless.
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.
Infrastructure can’t be run on thin air, Signal isn’t peer to peer, so infrastructure is essential.
Oh yea not denying that they need servers. But do they really need to rent them from Google and Amazon instead of hosting their own? Seems like pretty poor use of donations.
They talk about it in their blog post which I have linked, go read it.
I’m not who you are talking to originally, but as lot of that is just kinda nonsense. They say they can’t have their own servers in DCs around the world cause it would cost too much…. But it wouldn’t, that’s just incorrect. They’re clearly spending 1.3 million on s3 data and the short file lifetime is killing them. If they just bought drive capacity and hosted on VPSes around the world they’d likely have a much much smaller bill. Yeah it sounds scary, but they’re already doing scary stuff.
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.
Sorry, but you’re inherently wrong.
Well, when talking about server costs, (…)
We’re not.
Threema somehow has been running on a 5€ lifetime license and business customer subscribtions for over a decade.
Most users doesn’t even donate 1€ when using free messengers.
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.
They don’t offer ANY “nice-to-have” features 😭 You can’t even edit send messages, which I consider to be a basic reasonable feature (which is technically difficult to implement when having E2EE, etc. in mind)
We’re not.
Huh? You linked me an article where server cost is the lions share of signal operation.
Most users doesn’t even donate 1€ when using free messengers.
How does signal operate then.
They don’t offer ANY “nice-to-have” features
If they don’t have high server costs, unlike the example from the article you brought up, they should hire cheaper software engineers from a different country or scale down development and have a longer runway.
Like I said - them having this problem is probably due to poor planing.
I’ve read the article too and it also just seems badly designed. Their “storage costs” are most likely due to short s3 file lifetimes and so they’re literally just getting killed on storage for no reason. If they rented VPS space across the planet and just used normal hard drives their costs would likely drop instantaneously.
Knew Session was in trouble as soon as they introduced some sort of Session token stuff into the instant messenger app, which made zero sense.
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.
The idea is decent in theory, but not in execution. The idea is that token staking is done by node operators which makes it much harder to pull of 51% attacks as it requires hundreds of euros in money to be put aside. It also protects against poisoned nodes, which is theoretically possible on something like Tor because of how easy it is to spin those up for cheap. Besides that the token also funnels a tiny amount back towards the developers in an anonymous way that would help them during development.
In practice though they should have just went without the blockchain. I have been very interested in Session but their blockchain model was always one of the biggest things that might kill the whole project.
It costs money to run a node? That’s even worse. The people most willing to pay will be the ones up to no good.
It used to be around €1500 for a full node that could be shared by up to 4 stakers. Staking is different from mining coins though. You put tokens into some sort of holding and keep ownership of them. You then “mine tokens” by having the node do work while it is holding your stake.
Wait you mean the chat users have to pay to send traffic through the mix pool? This sounds worse and worse. Is BitMessage still around?
I would say once you’re observed sending data into Tor or anything resembling it, you’re already compromised even if your correspondent hasn’t been uniquely identified. I can’t see getting excited about the app.
No, it’s free. They have a whitepaper on their website: https://getsession.org/whitepaper
All in all there’s a pool of tokens that gets paid out to the stakers. The full network of nodes determines what nodes are eligible by testing each other. The pool gets a constant flow of tokens over time, while transaction fees and specific purchases (like a custom username instead of one of those long IDs) feed the pool as well.
Keep in mind I’m not here to sell it. I really wish it was more like free Tor nodes, in which case I would be hosting one already.
Hmm ok, but it still sounds kind of sus. One of the insights of the Mixmaster era is that what really matters is the amount of message reordering you can do, and that’s why remailers typically had 24 hours or more of latency. So I’ve never believed in Tor (near real time). Even with a text chat network, more than a few seconds of latency will have a significant usability hit. And also, as mentioned, using the service at all probably makes you into one of the usual suspects.
The Guardian (newspaper) handles this in an interesting way, for 1-way communication from users to the Guardian itself. They have a news reader app used by millions of subscribers to access news articles and stuff. And if you want to send them a confidential news tip, the app has a feature where you can enter a text message for their editors. The news reading protocol includes some space for this type of message in every transaction, under a layer of encryption so that an eavesdropper can’t see if a message is present. Allowing user to user communication through such a scheme could easily lead to mayhem, but for sending stuff to an identified recipient (the Guardian) that has some establishment cred, it’s clever.
You recognize one word in there and because you associate it with cryptocurrency you dismiss the entire thing.
To be fair, it’s a consistent red flag.
Blockchain is theoretically interesting. Very interesting, in certain niches. But 9 times out of 10, “blockchain-based” is code for “enshittified” or “a pyramid scheme scam from the start.” And in the cases where its implementation is altruistic, it’s still questionably sustainable or creates considerable overhead.
I mean, yeah.
But also, goddamn, are we not allowed to discuss projects with it with interest because a bunch of other assholes talked about it too much a few years back? (btw I fully expect to be having this exact conversation about genAI in about a decade)
Of course it can be discussed…
I’m really into (open weights) genAI myself, have been for years, but at the same time I’m under no illusion the space is clean. The vast majority of services are scams, many open source AI projects are autogenerated slop from someone with AI psychosis (if not outright Tech Bro scams), and that’s not even touching on what Big Tech is pushing.
What I’m asserting is that a fat slab of skepticism is healthy in this kind of space. Be an enthusiast, not a believer. I know much less about blockchain, so perhaps I was a little zealous in judgement, but something about this project just raised a lot of red flags in my head like scam-adjacent AI projects do.
Another thing is that the blockchain scams haven’t gone away, and in ten years they probably will still stubbornly persist. GenAI is going to be the same.
You’re 100% right, both of these technologies are absolutely stained by the people pushing them for their own benefit. I think they could be extremely useful technologies and I’m hoping this era of overhype doesn’t push the timeframe of that usefulness back because a bunch of billionaires were trying to buy their 4th yacht.
I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.
I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.
Agreed on that, too.
There was this one instance of a remastered” TV show, partially processed with GANs, a long time ago. I pointed this out (as apparently this little detail was forgotten with time), and I got chewed out. Reddit commenters either claimed I was lying (when I helped work on it), or declared it was now awful and intolerable just because it’s “AI”… something they had loved for years, way before the LLM bubble.
Yes?
Should’ve quoted it right away, but the parent comment quotes
it employs a blockchain-based decentralized network for transmission.
ping @[email protected] and other mod.
New archive snapshot is up. Should I swap the donation link to archive link?
It’s really up to you
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.
It’s not a stretch. Session is as decentralized as the Tor network. But just as with Tor, it has centralized people who manage the decentralized nodes and develope the software for them and the network.
it has centralized people who manage the decentralized nodes
so it’s not decentralized then. if one centralized group has to be around to control things or the whole network goes down, that’s not decentralized. that’s literally the exact opposite of the definition of the word decentralized.
Sorry, you very likely misunderstood me. The nodes are operated by other entities mostly independently (if we exclude the software), the Tor Project and in this case the Session foundation manage the index, get to decide which nodes to in-/exclude, etc.
so it works exactly like bluesky. would you say bluesky is decentralized?
Do those centralized Tor people also need 1m per year (which is Sessions donation goal), otherwise they shut the whole thing down?
Idk. But the Tor Project is doing quite well financially I think.
They do need to pay developers to get high quality software, which is especially for a message app centered around security.
Yeah, if they’d gone with a decentralized model, it’d be able to scale up without the extreme operating costs (Lemmy/piefed is a good example of that in practice).
Currently our best decentralized/federated instant messengers are XMPP and Deltachat, which cost peanuts to host.
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?
Only one to be honest 😅
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)
They say 1M per year, read the article
Ah the donation goal, good point
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
