Session will shut down on July 8th unless they raise $1 million dollars in funding

Session will keep going, see update video and donation page.

A 1-3 person team lead by Jason Rhinelander[1] is to carry on the development of Session, with even some STF members stepping back or only serving in a volunteer capacity. They say that most major features, including Session Pro, are very close to being released. While being regretful about the layoffs, Jason implies that the small team will use the limited funds to continue with LLM-assisted development to ensure that Session is worth the Session Pro subscription. He goes on to say that support is still appreciated to achieve these goals faster. Jason also expects that development will open up more to the community in some respects, especially once the multi-platform codebase restructuring is fully complete.

My opinion :

Given the limited funds, I think this is about as well as it could have gone (for Session).

I respect Jason’s mellowness, honesty and realism and I trust him to do what’s good for Session. He’s been active and approachable on Session, and the STF pretty much agrees he’s the right guy for the job. I’m willing to look past the STF’s history of leadership and throw my weight behind Jason on his work.

I know I’ve been quite critical of project’s direction. I think now’s the time for me to put that aside and focus on the survival of this privacy project. It undoubtedly has received much of the STF’s time and effort.

There have been some strong reactions to Jason’s statement that PFS and post-quantum crypto was added using AI. My interpretation is that no actual cryptography code was written using AI, just that AI was used to integrate a crypto library into Session. I think the statement deserves some clarification by Jason; see also my thread on the (very intentional) deterministic encryption used for Session profile pictures.

1. Chief Software Architect, Session Technology Foundation ↩︎