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?
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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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
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
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Asia? That salary? Dream on
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.
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.
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.
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ping @iopq@lemmy.world and other mod.
New archive snapshot is up. Should I swap the donation link to archive link?
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.
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)
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.
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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)
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Another reason why centralised communication is a bad idea.
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.
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.
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.
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They do need to pay developers to get high quality software, which is especially for a message app centered around security.
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?
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.
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