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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.
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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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
Higher end is "employed" nowadays. Silicon Valley is completing the move to India under the guise of "AI took them jobs".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Do those centralized Tor people also need 1m per year (which is Sessions donation goal), otherwise they shut the whole thing down?
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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.
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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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.
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
ping @iopq@lemmy.world and other mod.
New archive snapshot is up. Should I swap the donation link to archive link?
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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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