session-desktop VS oxen-core

https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios

This is the correct place to raise feature requests and bug reports: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/issues

We're at 1.10.8. Please update: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/releases

Session's reasoning seems much more... cagey. Telling people to recreate their identities themselves sounds a little like the Threema stopgap solution, but it's much sloppier (I can't imagine end users WANT to recreate their account and communicate this to all their contacts via a third party). They're talking about implementing this eventually, but the ticket for doing so was closed right after saying this.

Session F-Droid (version 1.15.4): Encrypted private messenger

Or Briar, Session, Tox, Element/Matrix, Jami...

Every official Session community hosted on the getsession.org domain, as well as the official websites (https://getsession.org, https://oxen.io) are unreachable as of now. https://lokinet.org seems to have issues as well.

Oxen is very much alive, as is Haven. Technologically Electroneum is very far away now, not being a privacy coin anymore, but it did start as a Monero fork and at least is still around.

Really great list. Thank you. Some of these I wasn't even aware of. I've been using Session for about a year. A year ago it definitely had some missed messages and I was about to ditch it but I held strong and haven't experienced that issue in a while. Been flawless for about half a year. The Oxen/Loki network overall https://oxen.io/ is a really interesting alternative to Monero and Tor. It's interesting how it can be both!

Widely used? No. I've found Session to be a decent alternative however it's still early development which entails some scuff and details as to how they intend for it to be financially supported long term aren't clear.

https://getsession.org/

TLDR on Session is that it's a fork of Signal (effectively same front end, key scheme, encryption scheme, etc) with a modified transport/delivery and notification system and without the phone-number-as-an-identifier caveat that signal has.

Note: Sorry for the wall of text below.

As for what that modified transport layer is, it's routing all the messaging and data hosting over Oxen (https://oxen.io/) which is a cryptocurrency that serves as a decentralised short term / small size addressable data store and an onion router for those messages/data. As much as cryptocurrency=bad in a lot of cases, here it kinda makes sense as it's just an automated digital marketplace for data hosting and bandwidth with tooling wrapped around it to support privacy and anonymity preserving tools without relying on some hopefully benevolent dictator to run it.

As for who's backing it, same group that develops the Oxen, an Australian non-profit focused on privacy tech and bearing the same name (Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation). While Oxen is pay for use (messaging and all that has an on chain cost), it looks like the foundation is covering the costs of running Session for the foreseeable future. Given the nature of the project, it should eventually be possible for users to pay their own infra costs however that doesn't seem to be implemented yet.

It's pretty easy to use.

1. Install via F-droid or download from the web.

2. Basic cryptocurrency wallet style setup where your account is based on a randomly generated "recovery seed" phrase (string of words with equal bits of randomness as the private key which can be used to rebuild the private key on a new device).

3. Then you can share your "Session ID" which is basically just your public key or you can pay for a custom username which is addressed to your public key (you can set names for contacts after adding them so the username is mostly for ease of discoverability).

4. After that it's basically just Signal but where you can make and throw away accounts at the drop of a hat.

My main complaints are

1. that it's a bit slow on delivery

2. The onion routing half of decentralised storage + routing is still being implemented for Session as the project is very much WIP at this stage.

----

My takeaway is that provided it can stick around, Session has potential to shore up where Signal falls short. Give it a year or two in the oven and I might recommend it as a daily driver for messaging.

Likewise for the OPTF and their goals in general. It looks like once Session is "fully implemented" they are looking at trying to expand the approach to a discord/slack/matrix competitor as well which could be interesting. As far as I can tell they are just a bunch of privacy nerds with a little bit of a cryptocurrency lean to them but they are doing good work.

Lets kickstart with Oxen, an open source privacy tech blockchain with 2 working products; Sessions Messenger - (a fully anonymous encrypted messaging service) and Lokinet - (a cutting edge low-latency onion router) - which both utilize the Oxen Service Node network to safeguard user privacy and anonymity.

The https://oxen.io/ community patiently waits for the integration of their Ledger app. Any idea on when that's going to happen?

Wallet3 RPC calls for Get Balance, Get Address and Export Keys https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1525

Removes macro and goto code in wallet2::import_outputs function https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1516