Dev

This week is the first week back from holidays, we still have a few devs who aren’t back yet but most of the team is now online and working towards an awesome 2023. The Session team is continuing their work on disappearing messages and closed group improvements, with an additional focus on bringing Android performance and feature parity to the same level as iOS. The core team is continuing its work on Wallet3, now tackling a subaddresses implementation for wallet3, and also working on some changes to the Oxen storage server for an upcoming mandatory service node upgrade. The Lokinet team is back with a vengeance (and a new addition to the team) and Jeff and Dan will be tackling liblokinet, making the necessary improvements to performance and reliability before its inclusion in Session.  

Oxen Core

• Fix public key parameter in ping endpoints

• Disable logging to stdout in wallet2

• Various fixes to RPC layer to get testnet working again with the testnet oxen observer

Session

Session Android

• Add updated delivery state UI elements

• Performance improvements

• Upgrade SQL cipher version

• Ongoing work on disappearing messages

• Ongoing work on closed groups

Session iOS

• Fix open group message trimming, fix issue where display names would be lost when linking a device, fix crash which occurs when more seed words are inputed than expected when recovering an account

• Set max video recording size to the maximum file size that can be sent

• Use Service Node offset time wherever possible in app

• Increase file upload size to 10mb

• Ongoing work on disappearing messages

• Ongoing work on message configuration changes

• Ongoing work on closed groups

Session Desktop

• Make default  notification setting for conversations “Mentions only”

• Provide link to open group directory in app

• Update wording from “Clear” to “Block” in Emoji reacts moderator panel

• Use alternate Session  key generation method

• Ongoing work on closed groups

Lokinet

• Updated RPM packages in our repository for recent versions of Fedora

• Fixes for openwrt cross-compiling

• Refactor/update lokinet CLI argument handling

• Initial work on a major internal code refactoring

• Fix unix sockets not working for lokinet RPC layer

Marketing

Welcome back! First Lab Update of 2023. We have a big (I mean really big) year ahead for the entire project. There are going to be major decisions, moments, and milestones this year which will shape our project going forward. 

Our first week back we did a large-scale, all-hands-on-deck retrospective of all the activities completed in Q4 ‘22. It can be easy to get into a routine and take for granted whether a particular thing is worth doing. We analysed all our ongoing and major projects to assess whether they were (or are) contributing to our goals and ambitions as a project, how they can be improved, or if our time, energy, and resources can be better spent elsewhere. You’ll be hearing from us about some of the changes we’re considering over the coming weeks, and you might see some changes to marketing activities, including things like our video content strategy, the future of the Session Tapes, and our advertising and promotion strategies (and some other stuff, too). 

Just like every other start-up, scale-up, and tech company in the world — we are working on incorporating AI into our workflows. It is clear that AI is going to be able to save time, increase efficiency, and help grease the wheels for certain kinds of work. We’re investigating how we can use it in the marketing team and what kind of work it can assist with. 

We’re continuing to work on optimising and localising our App Store and Play Store listings for Session. At the moment we are focused on German and Italian localisations, because Session has seen a large growth spike in Italy over the last few weeks. We’re also continuing to work with partners on improving and expanding localisations of Session itself. 

New Session merchandise is on the way — Connor and Wes have been working on the launch this week, so keep your eyes peeled. 

We prepared some communications for an upcoming update to Service Nodes — check out the details here. 

And last but not least, Alex has been working with Kee to make some updates to the Session Whitepaper to reflect the technical changes we’ve made over the last couple of years. 

Looking forward to another great year of working with y’all — I think this one will be the best yet.