24 hours ago, I permanently shut down the Session open group server sog.caliban.org.
A dump was made of the server’s PostgreSQL database and preserved for posterity and even potential future resurrection. The dump contains the full history of every group carried by the server at the time of its closure. This includes a considerable quantity of detailed domain knowledge unavailable elsewhere, particularly as it relates to the use of the SOGS ecosystem itself.
I can’t quite remember when I launched sog.caliban.org, but it was one of the first third-party SOGS on the platform, back when the server was still written in Rust.
With the PySOGS rewrite, the future of SOGS had never looked brighter. PySOGS sported a myriad of powerful new features, functionality that for the most part to this day still hasn’t been implemented in the Session client.
Alas, over the last few years, we have seen the open group ecosystem slowly reclaimed by the virtual jungle. For several years now, it has been all but disavowed by its creators and custodians, whose silent abandonment of the software has allowed the associated ecosystem to languish, fester and decay to its current state, whereby it is now little more than a sordid haven for the very worst elements of society (to wit, paedophiles), policed by a few dedicated souls determined to save humanity from itself.
The creators of Session are now consumed by a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save their own skins and keep the lights on in the Melbourne office. To this end, an unwieldy full 180° U-turn is being executed to abandon Session’s underlying private cryptocurrency, OXEN, and rejigger the project atop a new ERC-20 token with a public ledger, SENT.
Apart from the obvious privacy implications suggested by such a move, the focus of all OPTF resources on this one task has brought the already imperceptibly slow development of their user-facing software to a standstill. As a simple example of this, just consider how many years the Session community been waiting for the critically necessary reimplementation of closed groups.
That’s not the worst of it, however.
In the process of the switchover to SENT (which can be viewed as analogous to a stock split in the traditional equities market), the creators of Session have made the brazenly unethical and heavily lambasted decision to treat themselves much more favourably than the loyal community that has supported them and kept their operations afloat all these years.
OXEN holders will receive an allocation of SENT from a finite pool after the transition. The finite nature of the SENT pool is only the first catch, however. One must actively stake OXEN on the service node network during the transitional phase in order to qualify for the automatic conversion of that OXEN to SENT afterwards.
Those who elect for whichever reason not to participate in keeping the network afloat, perhaps because (like me) they have already incurred heavy financial losses that they wish to limit, will receive nothing at all. In the brave new world of SENT, they must find their own way to rid themselves of their now defunct OXEN, which itself has already become quite the challenge, as OXEN has been delisted from just about every cryptocurrency exchange over the last couple of years, due to the lack of interest in the currency. This lack of interest can again be attributed to the OPTF’s failure to properly develop and promote the OXEN currency.
Session’s creators have engineered this pivotal moment in an attempt to erase their chequered financial past and print a vault full of brand new currency for themselves. If they are successful, the subsequent market capitalisation of SENT will be much larger than that of OXEN, the chief effect of which will be that OXEN holders will see significant dilution in the value of their positions in the transition to SENT.
What we are witnessing here is the misappropriation and redirection of value from the community to the coffers of the OPTF. In simple language, we are being robbed.
The OPTF is marketing the transition to a public token as essential for the project’s survival, but even if that were true, nothing is forcing them to allocate a vastly disproportionate share of the newly minted currency to themselves. That is an entirely voluntary decision made for purely selfish reasons. It is theft, pure and simple. They know it and we know it.
With no revenue streams to speak of, but a payroll of handsome salaries to maintain, the well of money generated by OXEN’s initial coin offering (cf. IPO) in 2018 is now running out.
With bankruptcy looming ever larger on the horizon and still no monetised product in sight, a new way of replenishing the depleted runway had to be devised. Well, why not just mint a new coin and do it all over again. After all, it worked once, so why not twice?
Hopefully the wisdom of the old adage ‘once bitten, twice shy’ will prevail amongst the user base here, but the cryptocurrency universe is a fragmented and capricious one. Even cryptocurrency aficionados by and large still haven’t heard of OXEN, so there is ample scope for the OPTF to attempt to jettison the past and simply start anew with a fresh wide-eyed community of exploitable investor fodder.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the OPTF has launched its SENT discussion and support forums not on Session or Telegram, but on Discord, a platform that is anathema to most privacy advocates.
With their negligent treatment of SOGS, the glacial pace of Session’s development, the consistent lack of pre-release QA, the apathy shown to critical bugs and service interruptions, the failure to capitalise on real-world events to promote and grow Session, and now the unethical treatment of their investors, the management behind Session have shown themselves to be a self-serving band of crooks and incompetents.
This is the chief reason why I want nothing more to do with this project. Incompetence is, to a large extent, forgivable. After all, we are not born with knowledge, and intelligent people can learn from their mistakes. What I can’t forgive, however, is dishonesty. Without trust, we have no foundation on which to build.
The annals of tech history are adorned with great ideas that received terrible execution, and Session seems destined to join them before long. Under the current management, this project is doomed. The current custodians of the project simply do not possess the intellectual or moral wherewithal to see it through to success.
Even if they are successful in executing this coup against their own community, no good will come of it. It will merely postpone the inevitable. It doesn’t matter how much of a runaway you allocate yourself, if you possess neither the will nor the ability to reach take-off velocity. Failure is inevitable. It will just take longer, cost more, and raise the victim count this way.
After many years of broken promises, missed deadlines and excuses, this project’s team has still not managed to launch even a basic monetised product. Session incurs only losses for its creators, hence the management’s concentration now of all resources on the switchover to SENT.
It’s no exaggeration to state that Session continues to exist by the grace of its battle-scarred service node operators, many of whom (like myself) would like nothing more than to sell off our positions in the now practically worthless OXEN currency.
As an incentive to stay aboard the sinking ship, however, service node operators who continue to operate their nodes during the transitional period have been promised an extra allocation of post-launch SENT to mildly offset their OXEN losses.
This bonus is but a drop in the ocean; a tiny, withering carrot dangled in front of starving operators to goad them into continuing to keep the ailing network afloat at their own expense and against their better judgement.
And the ruse is working, because so many operators are so far into the red at this point that they have little left to lose. Every inveterate gambler wants to believe that a miraculous turnaround is still possible, even as his clammy hand lays his last few chips on the green baize of the roulette table.
Never underestimate the power of denial.
With this incentive from the OPTF, we’re effectively being told that they will steal less from us than from others if we agree to be complicit in their robbery. My response to this has been to shut down 39 of the 40 service nodes I used to run. My final node will be decommissioned when its current VPS contract expires.
The whole network is hanging by a volatile thread of delusional FOMO, coercion and resignation; and as we have seen in recent weeks, it takes only a single attacker to put the entire network under heavy strain. The Session network remains highly vulnerable to attack, and I caution users not to put more faith in it than it deserves.
Despite my misgivings, I have continued to offer sog.caliban.org over the last year as a continuing service to the community, a community I enjoyed being a daily part of until my decision to abandon the platform in December 2023.
Because sog.caliban.org was one of the first open group servers, it was disproportionately popular, probably second only to the official SOGS server. As such, I didn’t want to flip the switch overnight and leave the server’s many users high and dry. The SOGS ecosystem offers no redundancy whatsoever, so there would have been no easy way for orphaned users from my server to organise themselves and find alternative servers for their discussions.
Since the announcement on 24th June of the shutdown of sog.caliban.org, no-one came forward to take over the administrative and financial burden of running the server, although one or two people created replacement groups on other servers for a couple of the topics hosted by my server. These replacements unfortunately lack their predecessors’ message history.
All good things must come to an end, and so it was with a still somewhat heavy heart that I finally shut down and archived sog.caliban.org yesterday.
I wish Session’s users well in the future, and in particular in the continuing struggle to protect your digital rights against a determined foe that is gaining ground and encroaching on our privacy more and more with each passing day.