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.
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.